Tag: QR code

Printing Out Online Course Materials With Embedded Movie Links

Although an increasing number of OU courses include the delivery of online course materials, written for online delivery as linked HTML pages, rather than just as print documents viewable online, we know (anecdotally at least, from requests that printing options be made available to print off whole sections of a course with a single click) that many students want to be able to print off the materials… (I’m not sure we know why they want to print off the materials, though?)

Reading through a couple of posts that linked to my post on Video Print (Finding problems for QR tags to solve and Quite Resourceful?) I started to ponder a little bit more about a demonstrable use case that we could try out in a real OU course context over a short period of time, prompted by the following couple of comments. Firstly:

So, QR codes – what are they good for? There’s clearly some interest – I mentioned what I was doing on Twitter and got quite a bit of interest. But it’s still rare to come across QR codes in the wild. I see them occasionally on blogs/web-pages but I just don’t much see the point of that (except to allow people like me to experiment). I see QR codes as an interim technology, but a potentially useful one, which bridges the gap between paper-based and digital information. So long as paper documents are an important aspect of our lives (no sign of that paper-less office yet) then this would seem to be potentially useful.
[Paul Walk: Quite Resourceful?]

And secondly:

There’s a great idea in this blog post, Video Print:

By placing something like a QR code in the margin text at the point you want the reader to watch the video, you can provide an easy way of grabbing the video URL, and let the reader use a device that’s likely to be at hand to view the video with…

I would use this a lot myself – my laptop usually lives on my desk, but that’s not where I tend to read print media, so in the past I’ve ripped URLs out of articles or taken a photo on my phone to remind myself to look at them later, but I never get around to it. But since I always have my phone with me I’d happily snap a QR code (the Nokia barcode software is usually hidden a few menus down, but it’s worth digging out because it works incredibly well and makes a cool noise when it snaps onto a tag) and use the home wifi connection to view a video or an extended text online.

As a ‘call to action’ a QR tag may work better than a printed URL because it saves typing in a URL on a mobile keyboard.
[Mia Rdige: Finding problems for QR tags to solve]

And the hopefully practical idea I came up with was this: in the print option of our online courses that embed audio and/or video, design a stylesheet for the print version of the page that will add a QR code that encodes a link to the audio or video asset in the margin of the print out or alongside a holding image for each media asset. In the resources area of the course, provide an explanation of QR codes, maybe with a short video showing how they are used, and links (where possible) to QR reader tools for the most popular mobile devices.

So for example, here is a partial screenshot of material taken from T184 Robotics and the Meaning of Life (the printout looks similar):

And here’s what a trivial change to the stylesheet might produce:

The QR code was generated using the Kaywa QR-code generator – just add a URL as a variable to the generator service URL, and a QR code image appears :-)

Here’s what the image embed code looks like (the link is to the T184 page on the courses and qualifications website – in practice, it would be to the video itself):

<img src=”http://qrcode.kaywa.com/img.php?s=6&d=http%3A%2F%2Fwww3.open.ac.uk%2Fcourses%2Fbin%2Fp12.dll%3FC01t184&#8243; alt=”qrcode” />

Now anyone familiar with OU production processes will know that many of our courses still takes years – that’s right, years – to put together, which makes ‘rapid testing’ rather difficult at times ;-)

But just making a tiny tweak to the stylesheet of the print option in an online course is low risk, and not going to jeopardise quality of course (or a student’s experience of it). But it might add utility to the print out for some students, and it’s a trivial way of starting to explore how we might “mobilise” our materials for mixed online and offline use. And any feedback we get is surely useful for going forwards?

Bung the Common Craft folk a few hundred quid for a “QR codes in Plain English” video and we’re done?

Just to pre-empt the most obvious OU internal “can’t do that because” comment – I know that not everyone prints out the course materials, and I know that not everyone has a mobile phone, and I know that of those that do, not everyone will have a phone that can cope with reading QR codes or playing back movies, and that’s exactly the point…

I’m not trying to be equitable in the sense of giving everyone exactly the same experience of exactly the same stuff. Because I’m trying to find ways of providing access to the course materials in a way that’s appropriate to the different ways that students might want to consume them.

As to how we’d know whether anyone was actually using the QR codes – one way might be to add a campaign tracking code onto each QR coded URL, so that at least we’d be able to tell which of the assets were were hosting were being hit from the QR code.

So now here’s a question for OU internal readers. Which “innovation pipeline” should I use to turn the QR code for video assets idea from just an idea into an OU innovation? The CETLs? KMi? IET (maybe their CALRG?) The new Innovation office? LTS Strategic? The Mobile Learning interest group thingy? The Moodle/VLE team? Or shall I just take the normal route of an individual course team member persuading a developer to do it as a favour on a course I’m currently involved with (a non-scalable result in terms of taking the innovation OU -wide, because the unofficial route is an NIH route…!)

And as a supplementary question, how much time should I spend writing up the formal project proposal (CETLs) or business case (LTS Strategic, Innovation Office(?)) etc, and then arguing it through various committees, bearing in mind I’ve spent maybe an hour writing this blog post and the previous one (and also that there’s no more to write – the proof now is in the testing ;-), and it’d take a developer maybe 2 hours to make the stylesheet change and test it?

I just wonder what would happen if any likely candidates for the currently advertised post of e-Learning Developer, in LTS (Learning and Teaching Solutions) were to mention QR codes and how they might be used in answer to a question about how they might “demonstrate a creative but pragmatic approach to delivering the ‘right’ solution within defined project parameters”?! Crash and burn, I suspect!;-)

(NB on the jobs front, the Centre for Professional Learning and Development is also advertising at the moment, in particular for a Interactive Media Developer and a Senior Learning Developer.)

Okay, ranty ramble over, back to the weekend…

PS to link to a sequence that starts so many minutes and seconds in, use the form: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv_hOFT1S4#t=9m49s.

PPS for a good overview of QR codes and mobile phones, see Mobile codes – an easy way to get to the web on your mobile phone.

PPPS [5/2010] Still absolutely no interest in the OU for this sort of thing, but this approach does now appear to be in the wild… Books Come Alive with QR Codes & Data in the Cloud

SplashURL Now Splashes QR-codes too…

Three or four weeks ago, Chris Gutteridge realised an idea I’d blurted out at Dev8D by creating SplashURL (splashurl.net – Link Sharing, Presentation Style, or watch the SplashURL screencast):

if users ever give presentations that include displaying live web pages, and are keen for audience members to view those web pages on their own computers during the presentation, an efficient way of sharing bookmarks is required. Services like the feedshow link presenter allow presentations to be constructed from lists of links piped into the presentation tool via RSS feeds, and the complete set of links demonstrated in presentation to be shared via a single URL (either of the bookmark list, or the corresponding feedshow). However, for demonstrating single links, there remains the problem of how to efficiently share the URL with the audience. SplashURL uses a popular URL minifier to create a minified version of the URL, and then display it in a large, high contrast font so that audience members can easily refer to the same page as the presenter.

Anyway, it seems like Chris has been tinkering again, and has added another feature (and associated bookmarklet) to SplashURL.net – QR codes:

So now we can splash a big QR code onto the screen – so anyone with a QR-code reading phone can photo-click straight through to the encoded URI:

Nice one, Chris :-)

PS Just in case, I’ve been thinking about possible “business models”, or at least ways of developing the app in a sustainable way. And the idea I came up with? Adding the potential to skin – or “brand” – the splash pages with university or corporate colours/logos. (As a step towards this, we could let people provide the address of a CSS file, and make sure there are lots of id and <em?class hooks on the splash pages for users to customise.)

To provide “longevity” to the minified URIs, we could create a little standalone minifier that an institution could host locally, and hence preserve the minified URIs and the addresses they point to. Local hosting of minified URIs would also make it easy for the institution to run analytics over how the minified URIs were being used…

PPS I have to admit I’ve been thinking about the name again… Chris originally coined “BigTiny” as the name for the app, and I’m starting to feel that it’s a better name than SplashURL????