This week is going to be hellish. I’m helping some faculty put some language assessment test online in Desire2Learn, which has lead me to really rethink how to use some of the tools that the LMS provides. Their needs are such that they do language assessments and aren’t testing recall – so they want to play a video and have students take the quiz. Not a problem, you’d think. Of course, it is. The solution I came up with is to use an image information field, without inserting a picture, but using the comments section, which has full use of the HTML Editor, to insert the video at the top of the screen. The downside to this workaround is that if you have more questions than the screen holds, you have to scroll the video off the page.
I’ve also got to start refreshing my presentation from a couple weeks ago for a new audience, this one more receptive to web 2.0 and online stuff in general. Also it needs a piece that talks about how easy (and the potential drawbacks of integrating it into a LMS) it is to put into D2L.
I’m also doing my normal work routine stuff, helping train some faculty, creating media, working with video and text. By 9:30 this morning I hit most of my targets and was already drowning again in more work. Semester start-up indeed.