I got a great email from a friend and faculty member [represented anonymously here] at Rider who is getting into some audio creation for student use. He asked a great question, and I’m passing it on to you.
Rider Faculty wrote:
I just bought a mic for my iPod which will allow me to record my students, upload it into my computer and then email it to them. The files are about 1/2 a GB. Can I use Bb to help with this endeavor?
John responded:
As far as the iPod recordings – don’t try to email them! – the 500MB files [maybe they're actually half a MB?] would be unusable by anybody other than you at your desktop – it would take a day to download them, they’d bring our email server to a screeching halt, and in Blackboard we have an entire course size limit of 200MB, so you’d never be able to upload even one of these there. Also, you probably recorded a WAV or AIFF file, when what we want for audio distribution is MP3 or some other compressed audio format.
The good news is that it is almost surely a matter of quality settings. I have a podcast that I do at http://techarts.wordpress.com where the average length is 45 minutes and the average size is 25Mb or less. If you record at 96-128 Kbps with 11 KHz frequency and as mono, rather than stereo, your files will be much much smaller, though some quality will be lost.
We use a media server for storage and podcasting at http://media.rider.edu where I would put up, advertise, and maintain your audio files. You could use external links to point to them in Blackboard, but they would actually reside on Media, to save you space in your course.
Also, existing files that are half a GB can be reduced in quality to new settings [and therefore size] to make them reasonable for people to download. You can keep the original at the full size for posterity, but 500MB is a lot of space, and the difference in quality between a 500MB file and a 25MB file can be negligible if the conversion is done well.
I’d love to talk with you about this – can you give me a call? 609 896 5000 x7145.
John.
