First Audio Project Complete

Thanks to Nalin, Birendra, Arosha and Dr. George, we completed our first audio learning interactive.

We started out by thinking that an audio exercise might be a good way to personalize a sometimes dry and face-less subject - Research Methods. Nalin made up a script that mainly consisted of questions he would ask Dr. George. I asked him to prepare the questions from the students perspective - what would be the questions students have about the content. Nalin did an excellent job coming up with interview questions which we then sent off to Dr. George prior to the interview so that Dr. George could be well-prepared.

On the day of the interview, things went smoothly, Dr. George came well prepared and provided thoughtful, succinct and personalized answers to the all the questions. Nalin found a quiet spot on campus where the sound of air conditioners or traffic would not instill annoying background noise. Nalin used the sony digital voice recorder shown above which has proven to have a excellent recording abilities.


The next step for Nalin was to edit the audio so only the pertinent information was shared with the students and any "um's", "ah's", and long pauses were removed. Nalin was quick to learn the open-source audio editing software Audacity. Here are a few tutorials that will help anyone get started in audio editing with Audacity:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/manual-1.2/tutorials.html
http://www.tsof.edu.au/resources/sound/Support/tutorials.asp
http://teachdigital.pbwiki.com/podcasting

The last step was adding the audio to Moodle. This is where Birendra came in. We wanted a way for the students to EASILY access the audio. This meant not downloading it and playing it on an audio player that the student needs to find on their computer but rather using the internal flash audio player that Moodle supplies. Birendra used a host of sources to discover how to get the multimedia plug in to show up but of course, the most useful was: http://moodle.org/

I asked Birendra to make a screencast to explain the solution. You can view her tutorial on our wiki here: http://ouslce.pbwiki.com/f/as.swf (To keep the file small, Birendra created the screencast with no audio)

Here is what the audio activity looks like in Moodle:


If you're curious, you probably want to hear what the exercise sounds like. Here is a sample. 2min - 2.2 megs - mp3 (right click and save since Blogger does not have handy mp3 flash player). A special thanks to our office manager, Arosha, for lending her 'reporterly' voice to the audio session.