Tag Archives: Office Mix

ELESIG meeting about learning analtyics

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ELESIG = elearning evaluation special interest group.

I’ve just been to this meeting at the Royal Veternary college in Camden, London.  The talks were interesting and there was some interesting discussion.

Problems engaging staff and students with Learning Analytics:  It generally seemed as if Learning Technologists as a group are interested in what I call ‘small data’ i.e. Real time Learning Analytics for tutors and students as opposed to ‘Big data’ which tends to be of interest to management and is often not real time.  However, not many people have projects producing results that can be discussed.  There are barriers to the use of small data from :

  • students (not that interested),
  • tutors (this is too much like Big Brother for me and/or not interested)
  • Institutions (no clear leadership, not producing drivers to implement little data

Office Mix:  I was surprised to find that my implementation of Office Mix (earlier post on Recording a presentation using PowerPoint Mix and see ‘training‘ for details of my teaching on use of Office Mix) as a way of introducing small data to students in the flipped MSc I’m supporting was actually advanced to where a lot of other people were.  As I said to the group, the analytics of Office Mix promises much but I have yet to see it in action.

 Michelle Milner of UEL:  Michelle presented work that UEL has been doing around producing dashboards showing little data to students and tutors.  She also explained how they had been using Kontext to track students’ use of Ebooks.  One interesting fact she said was that they had done focus groups with students and that by discussing learning analytics students got more interested in the topic!  To me this suggests a point made on a JISC podcast about learning analytics I heard recently:  reports need to be delivered by a tutor as part of a one on one discussion if at all possible.  Michelle noted that in the real world that’s a big ask for a tutor already pushed for time.

Andy Kons:  Presented about an excel based program he’d produced to show analytics from Moodle.

Recording a presentation using PowerPoint Mix

howto

Office Mix is an excellent tool for none specialists to record screencast presentations.  The howto instructions below describes how to use it in this way with an output to video.

1      Install Mix

1.1] go to

https://mix.office.com/en-us/Home

and click ‘Get Office Mix’ top right.  Follow instructions to install the addon to PowerPoint.

2      Prepare Powerpoint

2.1]  Prepare your powerpoint talk in a number of slides in the usual way.

3      Set up audio and camera

3.1]  Now go back to your first slide.  On the Mix tab, select ‘Slide Recording Record’ (far left)

3.2]  The screen will now redraw with a black top and right border.  Firstly we need to set up the microphone and cameara.

3.3] on the right column select ‘No camera’ and also on the microphone pull down menu, select your microphone.

3.4] As a check, when you speak the volume will appear as a bar animation above ‘Microphone Options…’

4      begin recording

4.1] Click the red ‘Record’ button.  The screen will acquire a dotted red line border.  Start talking.

4.2] When you are finished with the audio that goes with the slide, click the red square ‘stop’ button

4.3]  Preview your recording using the blue triangle ‘Preview Slide Recording’ button.  Your audio and slide should play back.

4.4]  If you are happy, click the ‘Next Slide’ arrow button to proceed to the next slide.  Repeat the steps from [4.1]

4.5] If you are not happy with your recording, simply repeat the steps from [4.1] and when PowerPoint prompts you ‘Would you like to overwrite this recording?’ choose ‘Yes’.

5      Processing the finished powerpoint

5.1]  When you have added audio to all slides, click the ‘Close’ cross button top right.

5.2]  Click ‘File’ > ‘Save as’ to save your powerpoint slides and audio recordings.

5.3]  Under the Mix tab > export to video.

5.4] Select (720p) as the Video size and click next.

5.5] Save your Presentation with a sensible name.

5.6]  You should be able to play your created presentation and it work.

6      Advanced features

Office Mix has several advanced features which you may wish to use.  These are:

  • using animations within slides
  • inking
  • uploading to Office 365 for easy sharing

to investigate these see tutorial videos at https://mix.office.com/en-us/Home