Day: July 16, 2021

Carmen – Box Drive Links And What To Do With Them

Hey, I’ve Got Box Drive Links in My Carmen Courses!

IT@OSU has just published recommendations on what to do with all the Box drive links you may (probably?) have in your Carmen courses – as we move away from Box by end of calendar year 2021, this is something you’ll want to address sooner rather than later.

TL;DR

The process involves going through each course, finding your Box links and replacing those references with new links to the files in your OneDrive.  Unfortunately, it’s a manual procedure (there’s no automated way to deal with this).

**Now is a good time to rethink about best methods and options for course files and other content.**

More Details

The latest ODEE help document has a good outline of how to proceed with this shift.

The OneDrive integration in Carmen is quite good, and gives you better management of permissions for course file links.

It’s also worthwhile as you go through this process to read ODEE’s article on Using OneDrive with Carmen.

Options

Your course may be better served by adjusting where course files should “live” – consider file size, file type and overall course file quota usage.  ODEE has some good guidelines:

  • Store Course Files in Carmen course directly: Files quota in CarmenCanvas is currently 750 MB. Presentation and image files might all fit within the course quota.
    • Side benefit:  optimizing your content (especially images and video files) for web delivery can reduce your overall file space needs considerably.
  • Course Pages: Given that students are accessing your course content from a wide variety of devices (“stationary” and mobile), some content may be better served by using Pages in Canvas – e.g., Word documents that are mostly text-only.
    • Side benefit: editing content within the Canvas system, and reducing the need to upload new file versions.
  • Mediasite: Media files – including PowerPoint presentations that have an added voice0ver – are better served from Mediasite, which also is integrated into Canvas. The integration lets yu link to individual videos or use a channel as a playlist for a multiple recordings.
    • Side benefit:  Mediasite lets you see analytics about file usage/viewing.
  • University Libraries: Are you using resources from OSU Libraries?  Can you link to live digital copies, rather than “spending” your course file quota on uploads of PDF copies?
    • Side benefit:  links to “live” digital copies can be more accessible than a simple PDF.

As always, please contact ASCTech with any questions, or if you need additional assistance.