The traditional universities are entering the online world and are doing all at once. So suddenly the problem with that is that university managers have no tools to carry out certain demands.
Fortunately from time to time an open source development appears to facilitate the task. The Free Software is superbly suited to the needs of universities and is partly the reason for the success of products such as Moodle and Sakai.

The latest fashion is to record and upload lessons. The service is highly valued by students. As a result they can review the lesson once at home.

Record and distribute lessons is a process that requires large amounts of resources, both human and technical. Until now we did not know any development that would facilitate the task. Educational Technology Services of UC Berkeley has been working in this subject for a long time and just now has decided to open its Opencast project to other institutions. For this purpose the former July 10th ETS Berkeley held a meeting in Oxford with its European partners. We were very kindly invited to attend.

Opencast is a product developed over Apple’s Podcast Producer. It involves software and hardware and it allows to record lessons and the deliver them through different channels like YouTube and u-iTunes.
ETH Zurich has developed a similar product named Replay. At Oxford (pictures) we talk about how to organize the project and what to do in order to share developments, many of them already working. We all agree that we should have a common APIs.

The traditional universities would do well to follow the project if they want to record lessons and they need a product to automatize the task. Our interest is in using video, for example recordings of our
teachers, as teaching material. That is why our cooperation is based on transforming the recordings in full multimedia content as well as those contained in packaging formats IMS - Common Cartridge.

IMS Learning Impact took place in austin between May 12th and 15th. We presented MyWay project, more specially our iPhone solution that mixes text and audio, to the anual awards and .

Vece Rector of Technology Llorenç Valverde, Eva De Lera an myself had a wonderful time chatting with people all over the world about e-learning, standards and the future of teaching and learning. The feeling that we perceived is that we are really at the beginning of a new era.

In the picture: Eva, Chris (from Peirce College and a good friend) and myself receiveing our correspondant prizes.

The final prototype of the “karaoke” project. It’s an mpg4 movie so you can upload it to your iTouch / iPhone. Video to desktop (mpg4, 80Mb, Right click to dowload).

Thanks to Albert (Omaonk, programming) & Irene (design). They have done an outstanding job!

We have uploaded a very first version of a content for mobile devices.

As you can see it’s a flash movie that reproduces an speech, shows a text and higlight what is beeing said. With this format we are trying to overcome the loose of attention that occurs when you listen a long speech generated by a TTS. If you get lost you can get track of the content just by taking a look at the screen.

The sytem transforms the original XML content to SMIL and then to swf files using Open Laszlo. A last transformation to a video is required to reproduce it on mobiles devices as iPhone - as far as we know iPhone doesn’t play flash -.

In addition we are still working in the audio format. Check a previous sampler to listen it.

We’ve just started a pilot with seven students that are going to use an iRex Iliad eBook during a semester. Irex Iliad is an eInk device capable to reproduce text, pdf an html files. The screen is slightly bigger than in other eBooks but the point with Iliade is that it allow to take notes over the pdf files with an special magnetic pencil. We’ve edit a (very) short video with the basic instructions to use it. Here you have.

As we work toward automatizing multiple output formats, we were impressed by one of the newest gadget presented at the last Mobile Congress in Barcelona. The rollable phone and display has been created by PolymerVision, a spin-off of Philips, and it’s still going through a pilot phase.

See the Product Brochure for more information.

MyWay has been nominated for the IMS Learning Impact Award. The awards will be presented at the upcoming IMS conference this May 14^th through 18^th in Austin, Texas. Josep Rivera will also be presenting the MyWay project on Tuesday May 15^th at 11:20 in the Elizabethan room.

We are currently pilot testing our latest text-to-voice technology development in which background music, sounds, and a choice of different voice tones and styles are applied to ensure that the automatization from text to voice is engaging to the listeners. For more information about this project please contact Josep Rivera at jrivera@uoc.edu.

An audio sample using Loquendo as TTS engine, background music and sounds to organize the speech.