Lectures for disability students

Today’s an important day for me, it is the first time a plan I have designed is put into action. This planning began around the end of last year and it is using our most current technologies in a method that we have not yet attempted before.

The goal is to use the AdobeConnect system as a tool to facilitate interpretations of lectures to disabled students. The current systems for disabled students, especially the hard of hearing students primarily involves special interpreters to come onto campus with the student and interpret the professor’s lecture as it is happening. Another possibility is to have the professor pre-recorded the lecture and closed captioned it ahead of time for the class. There are challenges for both scenarios as the first puts are very high demand on local interpretation professional and the later stresses the instructor of the course. When I was approached by the Center for Students with Disabilities at the Durham College and UOIT campus, my solution was to use AdobeConnect.

Having the lecture broadcast live to an interpreter or caption specialist who are not local increases our pool of candidate. Since our campus is in a close proximity with many post secondary institutions, we are in a constant battle with these other institutions for interpreters and captioning specialists. With AdobeConnect acting as a conduit, we can now hire non-local interpreters and captioning specialists. They would have a virtual presence instead of a physical one, reducing the amount of physical stress on these people as well.

The Pilot lecture is officially today, for a Bio Chemistry class. The professor is using the Logitech Orbit AF webcam that I suggested for both the WebCam feed and the audio feed. I sat in a corner joining in to his lecture as a participant, listening and viewing his lecture from a participant point of view. The Webcam’s right light technology is amazing, it was able to pick up crystal clear images in a dimmed room. The room needs to be dimmed to reduce the washout effect on the projections. With the Lenovo built-in webcams, it would usually be a silhouette instead of a face, but I was able to see his skin pigment and features clearly.

With the audio recorded from the Orbit AF, even with Right Sound technology enabled, it was not able to pick up the student’s voices as clear as the instructors. My suggestion to the professor is to repeat whatever the live audience saids if it is worthy. The face tracking system of the Orbit cam was not tracking his face properly either. I believe that is a result of him being new to the Orbit AF, hence my suggestion was for him to use the Orbit cam when he is free. Once he got used to how the Orbit works, it should function better in a lecture scenario.

He loves the system so much that he actually brought his own Oribit AF and is now considering using the recording function for each lecture, enabling his students to review each lecture in the future. He is now looking forward to the next lecture, hopefully with the full captioning crew this time.

Tags: AdobeConnect, class, disabled students, Durham College, face, interpreters, lecture, technology

Visiting Oshawa Downtown part two

After meeting with the audio specialist yesterday, I scheduled a test run of the plan immediately. The target was to have a full dry run of the systems today. The crew consists of the audio specialist, the video specialist, my coworker and myself. With all the equipment we needed, all of us arrived at the Regent theatre this morning looking forward to the test.

This is the first time the University of Ontario Institute of Technology attempts to host an event live and virtual simultaneously. The backbone of the virtual portion is the AdobeConnect system I administrate. The current plan is to have physical hardware handle all the video and audio capture while the computer simply broadcast the feeds onto the AdobeConnect server. The Q&A pod will be employed to allow virtual participant to ask questions.

This entire event will take place in the Regent theatre. While we were setting up the equipment, we started talking about the theatre. According to the two specialists, this is the first theatre to have air conditioning build into it. The theatre was built in the early 1920s and the style of air conditioning available than differs from our current ones very greatly. The theatre walls have massive air vent along the top with air holes for cold air to flow downward.

To generate the cold airflow, massive amounts of ice blocks are carried to the top of the ceiling. With the help of nature, air passes through the ice blocks, cools down and travel downward to the audience. This is a bold piece of engineering and it also explains the numerous water damages along the walls of the theatre.

Another part of the theatre that attracted my attention are the building materials used. These generally are creations that were eliminated by time. I have been heavily influenced by my father who was in the civil engineering business, therefore I have learn a little bit about buildings and the art to observe man made structures in details. One particular piece in the theatre that caught my eye was the emergency exit sign.

Notice how it is made of ceramic? It is not painted on or pieced together from little pieces. It is one whole piece of ceramic tile designed especially for the purpose of being a sign! The last time I saw something remotely similar to this was in Macau, where some of the older street signs were made of ceramic and were built to last.

Tags: AdobeConnect, air conditioning, conditioning, equipment, specialist, test, the Regent theatre, University of Ontario institute of technology, video specialist

Faculty of Education

“….by the way, our meeting with the Dean is at 9 am!” was a message I received just before I depart from my last day of AdobeConnect training.

A colleague and myself have been attempting to get a hold of the Dean at the Faculty of Education for quite sometime now. There is a conference in the new year he is planning and part of the conference would be on one of my systems, AdobeConnect. I have been administering this system for approximately two years now and have finally received Adobe approved training. This training have enabled me to understand the system more in depth from a user’s perspective and allowed me to recommend usage of the system more accurately.

The Faculty of Education is located on 11 Simcoe street north, Oshawa. It is in the heart of downtown Oshawa and is near the Oshawa bus terminal. The building is rented and there is a security guard at the front door asking for identifications whenever people enters the building. This was primarily to protect the students and to keep the drug addicts outside.

The event I am asked to help out with is an Educational base conference, topics surrounds social media and teacher learning.

The goal is to pull teachers into the current century and use some of the modernized tools in everyday teaching.

It sounds really interesting and I am glad I can be a part of this event.

Tags: AdobeConnect, building, colleague, faculty, Faculty of Education, oshawa, way

Moodle on Ubuntu

Yesterday, I have just installed Moodle on a distribution of Ubuntu Workstation (9.x) for a test of moodle. What I have immediately found out is that Ubuntu have a default version of Moodle that works with either MySQL or PosteSQL. No Database support, for DB like Oracle, MS SQL, or others.

Moodle, according to Moodle.org supports many Databases, so I guess we would have to rely on non-default packages if we want to use databases other then the two.

A command one might want to know if using the default Moodle on Ubuntu: sudo dpkg-reconfigure Moodle.

Tags: default version, Moodle, MySQL, SQL, support, test, Ubuntu, Yesterday