CarmenCanvas

ASC ODE Adds New Student Wellness Resource (12/2/2022)

Check out the latest resource “My Mental Health at Ohio State” provided by the College of Arts and Sciences Office of Distance Education!

Our students come to us with a range of needs: mental health is a critical part of wellness and having resources to hand helps us respond in the moment.

The ASC ODE team has even built a page within the ASC Distance Learning Course Template for Carmen, including ASC-specific and University-wide mental health and wellness resources — you can import this directly into your course(s).  Even better, this resource will be regularly reviewed and updated.  To preview or import the page, once logged into Carmen, you can search on “ASC Student Mental Health and Wellness Resources” to navigate right to the resource.

Shameless Plug:  ASC ODE has built an extensive list of tools, templates, course design assistance, plus plus – it’s worth checking out the Resources page, whether you’re just starting to build a course, or want to keep evolving and developing your existing content.

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.

Zoom – Extension of Implementation Date on Change to Cloud Recording Retention

This just in…

OCIO has announced that the retention schedule change for Zoom cloud recordings will NOT take effect on December 18, 2020; rather, that change will be delayed to February 5, 2021.

Read the details on it.osu.edu’s article, published 12/9/2020.

The 270-day retention schedule will still change to 120 days, as of February 5, 2021.

This means any cloud recordings – all meetings or webinars – whether recorded from carmenzoom.osu.edu or within CarmenCanvas, on or before October 8, 2020, will be deleted on February 5, 2021.  The 120-day retention schedule rolls forward from that date, and all new cloud recordings will be kept for 120 days.

When you log into carmenzoom.osu.edu, you will see this announcement on the landing page:

Screenshot: CarmenZoom Landing Page

 

 

 

 

 

What’s the Effect on My Course?

This mainly affects instructors and courses where recordings need to be kept and used from semester to semester.  The shift to 120 days’ retention was intended to give instructors coverage for “the current term”, but if you know you will be reusing your recorded content across multiple terms, make sure you archive those files to longer-term storage.  (Zoom is not considered by OCIO/ODEE to be the location for long-term storage; think about utilizing Mediasite for that purpose, but also consider the storage limitations on Mediasite, too…)

Where Do I Put Recordings That I Need to Save, Long-Term?

OneDrive/Sharepoint – Individual users have 5TB (that’s “terabytes”) of storage assigned to them; an MS Team gets 25TB (again, that’s “terabytes”).  You’ll be able to fit a lot of content into that area, but do some calculations of how much room you have taken up by all your other work-related content.

Mediasite – A fairly easy place to manage file/folder organization and viewing permissions for OSU-based folx; also, ODEE is working on setting up the integration with Carmen, soon-ish – that LTI will make it easier to continue scheduling from CarmenCanvas, and manage course recordings.  Again, from the OCIO/ODEE point of view, Mediasite isn’t a super-long term storage mechanism; spend some time considering what chunks of your content need which retention schedule.

Zoom – Changes to Default Recording Settings / Upcoming Change to Cloud Recording Retention

Two items for the latest on Zoom:

1. Changes to Default Recording Settings (Gallery v. Speaker View)

OCIO has made a change to default recordings settings in Zoom as of the end of October, 2020 – to see the change, log into carmenzoom.osu.edu, and navigate to Settings – Recording.  In the Cloud Recording settings section, note the checkbox indicated by a red arrow:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With this adjustment, gallery view will not be automatically recorded in addition to the speaker view.

You can still get both recording versions by adjusting your own CarmenZoom profile; checking the box will ensure that both recordings are captured.  Note that the “Record active speaker…” checkbox applies by user, rather than to meetings (whether individual or recurring).

And note the options you have, once the checkbox is checked:

Zoom profile recording settings - options

 

 

 

2.  Upcoming Change to Cloud Recording Retention

**NOTE: [UPDATED, 12/9/2020] THE CHANGE IN RETENTION PERIOD FOR CLOUD RECORDINGS HAS BEEN DELAYED TO FEB. 5, 2021. The retention period will STILL be changed to 120 days, but it was decided to provide additional time for end-users to archive any recordings needed.  Still – go through your archive of cloud recordings, and ensure you have downloaded what you need, to longer-term storage.

For more information, see my latest post with more info and details.

At some point in November, the retention period for Zoom cloud recordings will be SHORTENED (less than 270 days); this change is to make best-practice use of back-end resources.  More info to come from OCIO, as the change date is formally announced.

(As a general best practice, it helps to every so often review your list of cloud recordings; the date on which each recording will be deleted is indicated for each entry. Download the file(s) if you need to archive.)

 

Carmen – SpeedGrader – How Do My Students See My Feedback?

SpeedGrader is a great way to take Assignment submissions in Carmen, and provide feedback not only on the overall work, but at specific points (“in-text” annotations) within the submission document.

Students may have problems finding the feedback you’ve provided – it is rather hidden… so how can your students see your comments?

Mike Bierschenk, of ASCTech, has constructed an excellent reference guide that you can provide in your course; it walks through:

  • New grade or comment notification;
  • Accessing the Assignment’s Submission Details page;
  • Layout of the Submission Details page (the all-important “View Feedback” link); and
  • Previewing and downloading in-text feedback.

A quick note about Notifications: remember that your students have control over what kind of notifications they receive from a course.  To learn more about Notifications preferences (both from the instructor and student views), check out the Teaching and Learning Resource Center’s guide.

I hope this helps you and your students; my thanks to Mike for sharing his excellent documentation!

AU Instructor Workshops – Links to Recordings, Slides, etc.

Thanks to all who attended the AU Instructor Workshops so far… we’ve covered A LOT of ground, and I definitely want to go back and fill in on the wide variety of topics.  Thanks also for all the feedback, participation and questions – those will inform ongoing efforts.

Part I – August 7, 2020 –

Part II – August 14, 2020 – this session was much more of a walk-through on course shell setup, Carmen Key 4, Assignments, and discussion of ways to manage online teaching

Changes to CarmenCanvas for AU 2020

Check out ODEE’s article regarding the latest updates to the Canvas LMS for AU 2020…

One item you may want to test out/play with is that the new rich text editor (RTE) is available for your course(s).  The old RTE will be phased out later this year, but I think you’ll like the new one: no tools have been removed, but the rearrangement is nice, and more intuitive.

The ability to drag/drop media is a BIG advantage, IMHO… this applies to pix, videos, recordings that you’re adding.

If you want to see the difference visually, an earlier ODEE article lets you flip between old and new versions to take a look.