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[voxprincipalis]

Hi all,

Because of downsizing at my school, class sizes are growing to an unmanageably large size. Normally in my theory/ear-training classes, I have students prepare assignments for individual in-class performance. However, with my projected class sizes for next year, this will be next to impossible given the short class period we have. I am unwilling to give up on the performance assignments, since I think they are important to the students' learning experiences, and so I'm looking for a way that students can record themselves singing the assigned exercises and then upload them to a dropbox of sorts. I plan to have them use Audacity for the recordings and convert the files to MP3s, but I don't want them to send those to my email inbox. I'd rather have them go in a dropbox where they don't clog up my inbox.

We are on Moodle, where there is no dropbox feature (at least not in the version we have, which is not the latest version and may not even be the one below that). Right now I am experimenting with the Dropbox freeware app for the Mac and finding it reasonably useful, provided the file sizes don't get unduly large. It's annoying that students have to provide email addies in order to use Dropbox, but that's something I can get over by just requiring them to do it at the start of the semester. I can foresee some other problems with it right now but they are probably not significant enough to make me not want to use it.

Any other recommendations for web dropbox services? Obviously, free is better -- I can't see my school shelling out any money for this.

VP

[zarathustra]

I'm just tagging myself onto this thread so I can follow it.  I imagine I may be in the same position next semester.

[lifeisgood]

Would it be too annoying to create a free Gmail account and use that for the drop? At least it would keep the stuff out of your regular inbox.

[voxprincipalis]

Would it be too annoying to create a free Gmail account and use that for the drop? At least it would keep the stuff out of your regular inbox.

This could work. Somehow I still have the "dropbox" concept in my brain (I was influenced by Blackboard at an early age!) but I don't see any reason why using Gmail wouldn't be a viable alternative.

Except: the school email system (a) is sometimes buggy, and (b) does not allow university.edu addresses to send to non-university.edu addresses if you are not on campus. While it is unlikely that a student would run into that problem often, there is the possibility of "Oh, I was at Panera/at home visiting my family for the weekend/in a space alien vessel when I tried to send it to you and my email wouldn't let me send it, so I'm turning it in late."

I want something that's accessible from everywhere, including space alien vessels.

VP

[scampster]

Except: the school email system (a) is sometimes buggy, and (b) does not allow university.edu addresses to send to non-university.edu addresses if you are not on campus.

Not trying to hijack your thread, but this has to be the weirdest e-mail system I have ever heard of (as I am winding my way through my third university...

Anyway, the chances are that most of your students already have a gmail account, so as long as they have web access they can send things to your dropbox e-mail. If they don't already have a gmail account (or hotmail or whatever), you can alert them to this issue and if they want to submit things off campus, then they just have to sign up for gmail account too.

I am pretty sure gmail is what space aliens are using these days too...

[daniel_von_flanagan]

Except: the school email system (a) is sometimes buggy, and (b) does not allow university.edu addresses to send to non-university.edu addresses if you are not on campus.

Not trying to hijack your thread, but this has to be the weirdest e-mail system I have ever heard of (as I am winding my way through my third university...

It is a measure to prevent spammers from hijacking university accounts and mass emailing from them.

gmail: On another thread I brought up some of the hazards of gmail for university business. - DvF

[nordicexpat]

Hi,

I might be wrong about this, but doesn't the Assignment feature of Moodle allow students to upload a file?  Unfortunately, versions older than than 1.8 only allow one file per assignment, but I imagine that you could just have more than one assignment if you wish.

If you don't have assignment activated, ask your tech people if they can do it.  Ours didn't have SCORM enabled until I asked, and then it magically appeared.  (We've been using 1.6, which is really antiquated, thankfully, they are finally updating it).

 

[voxprincipalis]

Hi,

I might be wrong about this, but doesn't the Assignment feature of Moodle allow students to upload a file?  Unfortunately, versions older than than 1.8 only allow one file per assignment, but I imagine that you could just have more than one assignment if you wish.

If you don't have assignment activated, ask your tech people if they can do it.  Ours didn't have SCORM enabled until I asked, and then it magically appeared.  (We've been using 1.6, which is really antiquated, thankfully, they are finally updating it).

Well, my understanding based on what I learned while setting up this semester's site is that enabling certain aspects of assignments makes it impossible for you to do other things that I want to do. I need to investigate this further, but it was a problem for me. For instance, in order to be able to give comments via Moodle, I'd have to set up an assignment as an external assignment, which then meant I couldn't tell Moodle to aggregate all the data of one kind of assignment and drop the lowest score.

However, if I am wrong, please tell me! I will happily take any solution that fixes this!

(I think we are on 1.8 of Moodle now; they have not announced any plans to upgrade.)

VP

[antiphon1]

I have my students upload performance videos on Moodle using the assignment feature.  However, the videos are visible to all the students enrolled in the class.  Is this what you have in mind? 

Talk to your IT/Moodle person.  You can upload video.

Note:  Our system wants the video in a certain format (can't remember which one).  Check with the person or persons in charge about the format.

[voxprincipalis]

I have my students upload performance videos on Moodle using the assignment feature.  However, the videos are visible to all the students enrolled in the class.  Is this what you have in mind? 

No, I definitely don't want them to be able to access each other's performances. (Although if they were actually performing live and in-class, everyone hears everyone else and that's part of the pressure to perform well, but somehow that's different to me from deliberately listening to someone's recording. I don't know, maybe that's weird and nonsensical.)

Also, I only need audio, not video, so that might make it easier. They will probably be uploading MP3 files.

VP

[antiphon1]

I have my students upload performance videos on Moodle using the assignment feature.  However, the videos are visible to all the students enrolled in the class.  Is this what you have in mind? 

No, I definitely don't want them to be able to access each other's performances. (Although if they were actually performing live and in-class, everyone hears everyone else and that's part of the pressure to perform well, but somehow that's different to me from deliberately listening to someone's recording. I don't know, maybe that's weird and nonsensical.)

Also, I only need audio, not video, so that might make it easier. They will probably be uploading MP3 files.

VP

Ah!  Audio files....   I don't know if Moodle does audio.  Does your institution do RSS feed?  Again, I would check with the IT department and/or the mass communications department.  Sometimes students with disabilities use audio files, so your counseling center may have some information about how to set up  an account for your purposes.

[nordicexpat]

I would probably post a message to Moodle site and see what you can come up with:

http://moodle.org/login/index.php

You might also want to do a Google search for "drop-box" and Moodle to see if someone has already asked your question.  If I remember correctly, you can configure options for the Assignment feature so that either students can or cannot see everyone else's postings (I haven't tried to upload audio, but I don't see why you wouldn't).  I've been waiting to experiment with Moodle until we have the recent upgrade since I only started using it this semester.  I've found that that are a lot of ways to workaround whatever problems might occur, but they are not always obvious. I think the Moodle groups are a pretty good source for information (I've always been curious why forums on sites like Moodle and other sites are much more successful than when I try to institute them in my own classes, but that is an issue for another thread).
 

[nordicexpat]

Hi,
I was curious, so I started playing around a bit.  I think if you wanted to prevent everyone from seeing each other's uploads, you would need to play with the separate groups option of the Assignment feature.  Place each student in their own separate group, and then set the "group mode" for separate groups.  I'm not sure how much work would be involved in creating a one-student group for X amount of students, however.  Our version of Moodle is older than yours, so there may have been some progress since then.

Not sure what's possible in the latest version of Moodle.  Bit of a pain that universities don't properly fund and/or support e-learning, but that is yet another issue for a different thread).

[voxprincipalis]

I have my students upload performance videos on Moodle using the assignment feature.  However, the videos are visible to all the students enrolled in the class.  Is this what you have in mind? 

No, I definitely don't want them to be able to access each other's performances. (Although if they were actually performing live and in-class, everyone hears everyone else and that's part of the pressure to perform well, but somehow that's different to me from deliberately listening to someone's recording. I don't know, maybe that's weird and nonsensical.)

Also, I only need audio, not video, so that might make it easier. They will probably be uploading MP3 files.

VP

Ah!  Audio files....   I don't know if Moodle does audio.  Does your institution do RSS feed?  Again, I would check with the IT department and/or the mass communications department.  Sometimes students with disabilities use audio files, so your counseling center may have some information about how to set up  an account for your purposes.

Currently I upload MP3s to Moodle for the students to listen to and/or download, so that part works fine. I would really, *really* like to avoid using Moodle for this, though. That whole "separate groups" thing sounds nightmarish. 50 separate groups? Eeek.

Thanks to all, esp. nordicexpat! for the suggestions and thoughts. I've looked at some things on the Moodle help forums from time to time but the business of not having the latest version of Moodle has led me down the wrong garden path a few times -- I think I'll have found a solution to my problem and then I'll realize that that's only in the latest version and in fact it's un-doable in my version. Argh. I'll be doing some playing around myself and will let you know if I find out anything else useful.

Again, thanks for the suggestions, and I certainly welcome more if anyone's got 'em!

VP

[balancing_act]

Voxy, have you tried the MobileMe service (formerly .Mac)? I know it's not free, but it would solve a lot of problems for you. I've created a website for my husbands various classes (no HTML knowledge required) and it's really easy to use. It's $100 per year, and we've found it worthwhile. There are cheaper solutions, but I use so many of the MM's features beyond the website.