This is an archive of the 2013 version of ocTEL.

Seek and ye shall find (or maybe not…..)

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  • #3382
    GrahamRGibbs
    Member

    Angela, re your point about embedding links within the VLE. I’ve had some experience with this and I think there are issues that the community needs to think about.

    First, most of the resources are from YouTube and I use the embed code from YouTube to put them on the pages in our VLE (Blackboard). The problem with this is that not every academic will be able to do this. There is a Blackboard supported way of doing this but it’s not a neat as embedding and besides it requires that you find the resource from within Blackboard (even if you already have it in YouTube).

    Second, I found this year that a lot of the embedding was failing, I think, because the Blackboard code had been upgraded so that the old embed code didn’t work. In one or two cases the video had also been withdrawn from YouTube. I had to do a lot of work fixing this.

    This leads to the longer term issue of permanence. You can’t rely on links remaining for any time. Stuff gets moved and deleted all the time – as anyone who runs a website knows, links are always breaking. There has been little discussion in the literature about how do deal with this. Should we be downloading the resources to our VLE – not an easy thing with YouTube videos and in the case of some re-usable learning resources, impossible? If the resource has a CC licence this is at least legitimate. Over the years I’ve had experience of things disappearing before I had a chance to get a copy. Sometimes thing go for understandable copyright reasons. But there are other reasons too. For example, one of my YouTube videos was imperfect. A user wrote to me to say that there was not sound on it. Turned out it was only on one of the two stereo channels and they were listening to the one with no sound! So I recreated the video with proper sound in both channels and re-uploaded it. But there was not easy way to replace the original (and that was coming up high in the search results because of the number of views) so I kept both old an new versions (with a link for the old to the new). But at some point I’ll want to delete the old version and then any links to it will break.

    #3417
    philtubman
    Participant

    i wrote a blog post on the discoverability and sharability of resources that seems pertinent to this discussion:

    http://sophistryblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/from-oer-to-cmooc-to-github-proposal.html 

    #3631
    James Kerr
    Participant

    Embedding resources, such as YouTube videos, into VLE and LMS is convenient, but only effective as long as the original source remains, and as long as the provider supports the types of linkages and embedding you use.  Granted, this example is about 2 years old, but we still regularly deal with the effects of this change from YouTube:

    http://www.reelseo.com/youtube-iframe-html5/

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