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Thursday, September 13, 2018

Next Generation Mobile Sharing



Emporia State has begun a pilot adoption of Mersive Solstice mobile sharing. Mersive represents the latest generation in wireless collaboration. This product supports an unlimited number of students connecting to the Mersive Pod - provided bandwidth is sufficient. The Pods are about the size of a man's wallet and hide discretely behind the monitor. Images, videos, applications (apps), documents can all be shared via Mersive Solstice. Not only that, but each student can share multiple files, images, or videos at the same time! Dr. Matt Seimears, Chair of Elementary Education, Early Childhood, and Special Education, is using Mersive as a replacement to the course text. Mersive works equally on iOS and Android. A Chrome version is in development.

Three students sharing their screens at the same time using Mersive


Additional Mersive functionality includes the ability to create a "stack" of shared images. The stack can then be flipped through, like a flipbook. Stacks can be disaggregated as well.

Mersive Stack Screen
Creating a Mersive Stack is as easy as clicking on an image


Mersive Flipchart Screen
Mersive Stack with Flipping Capability


Moreover, images or shared files can be drug to the left sidebar of the screen to move them out of the way. If the presenter wants the image back, they simply drag it back off the left hiding panel.

The left peek-a-boo panel provides a convenient hiding place for images when not in use


Finally, each student is represented by what Mersive refers to as a Meeple. These Meeples appear along the bottom of the screen and are color coded to represent each person. The color code is carried into the main screen and borders the files being shared by that person so that others can quickly associate who is sharing which files using color coding. Other features include a Grid array that lines up shared images in a tidy format.

Mersive Meeples (People) appear along the bottom and represent each student


The next iteration of our rollout will include panels that support touch capabilities to control Mersive Pods. We're super excited to demonstrate this technology to any interested faculty!



Sunday, September 2, 2018

Accessibility Support - Panopto


Accessibility is a critical feature we look for in all of our supported learning technology applications. Fortunately, the purveyors have responded to this requirement by updating their products in order to support both disabled and able-bodied students alike. In fact, able-bodied students take advantage of accessibility features too - such as using closed captions in environments where speakers or earbuds cannot be used. In this blog, we look at the accessibility features in one of our most popular products - Panopto. To date, nearly 16,000 users have viewed Panopto recordings at ESU. Approximately 700 faculty, staff, and students have downloaded and installed the Desktop Recorder, which was used to create nearly 11,000 recordings.



PANOPTO ACCESSIBILITY

Panopto offers accessibility features that allows users to easily navigate and read the Panopto web interface. The web interface supports screen readers for all available creator and viewer interfaces. The web interface also support keyboard access, allowing you to use the tab key to access all available functions. All sessions fully support adding and displaying captions.

SCREEN READER SUPPORT
Panopto supports the following screen readers:
  1. JAWS
  2. NVDA
  3. VoiceOver for Mac
KEYBOARD ACCESS
All of the functionalities and links in the web interface are accessible by using the tab key. The tab key will move from function to function, and you can hit enter to use that function. 

VIEWER CAPTIONS
The Panopto viewer will display captions for the session when available. The caption will show in two places. The first is under the Primary Video in the Captions tab. The caption that is currently being spoken will be highlighted in grey. The second is either overlaid on the secondary video or docked directly under the video. Panopto includes an artificial intelligence engine that can generate Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) captions. Keep in mind that the quality of the ASR can degrade significantly if the microphone is further than a few inches from the presenter, or if there are significant room distractions/noise.



SHORTCUT KEYS
The new viewer allows you to use shortcut keys to control the player:

  • Spacebar - Pause/Play the session
  • Left/Right arrow keys - skip 5 seconds backward or forwards
  • Up/Down arrow keys - adjust volume up or down
  • The M key - mutes and unmutes the recording
     
EMBEDDED PLAYER CAPTIONS
When captions are available for a session they will also be displayed on the embedded video player. When you embed a video with captions, the captions will overlay the video as shown below. You can see how to embed videos here