lodeStar Learning Web Journal

The LodeStar Galaxy of Stars is joined by three new members: Brancher, Syncher, and Panner. These three templates add powerful new strategies to the eLearning instructor’s tool bag. This article will explore the capabilities of each of the templates and then conclude with directions on how to find and use them.

Brancher

Brancher is the first of the new templates that supports a broad range of activities. On one end of the continuum, instructors can use Brancher to produce a simple slideshow; on the other end, instructors can use Brancher to create sophisticated scenarios that branch students in different directions based on their choices or performance.
In the example linked to below, the student is given basic information about digital photography. The student is then asked what aperture and shutter speed settings are used to recreate the displayed photograph. Based on the student’s answer, the program branches in one of three different directions.

http://www.lodestarlearning.com/samples/Demo_Brancher2/page.htm

For those instructors who want greater control over the eLearning activity, Brancher supports the concepts of gates and walls. Gates require that students meet or exceed a minimum score before entry; walls restrict a student’s free movement within a section.

To use Brancher, instructors will need to download LodeStar 5.3.1. The .1 is very important. 5.3 was first introduced at the Minnesota eLearning Summit 2008. Since then improvements to LodeStar were made and introduced in 5.3.1.

Panner

Panner, the second template, provides a scrolling view that can be used for different purposes. In the example linked to below, Panner is used to display a historical timeline.

http://www.lodestarlearning.com/samples/Minnesota_History/index.htm

Panner can also be used to tell a digital story. Instructors can include text, images, animations, video and audio in the scrolling view. In effect, instructors can use Panner to create a gallery that individuals move through by dragging the scroller.

Syncher

Syncher enables instructors to synchronize text, images, etc. with specific points in an mp3 audio file. These are called cue points. In the example below, the author has chosen a podcast from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (Instructors can either use an mp3 file (like a podcast) from an external server or they can upload from their own hard drive.)

http://www.lodestarlearning.com/samples/Demo_Syncher2/page.htm

To use Syncher, instructors need to play the audio file with their favorite software like Windows Media Player, ITunes, Audacity or whatever. They then record the points in the audio (min:secs) that they would like to reinforce with text, bullet points, graphics, animation or even questions to check for understanding. Finally, they use lodestar to add the graphics and enter in the cue points for when the graphics should appear.

Where are Brancher, Syncher and Panner located?

To use these tools, instructors require a full license key. The Brancher, Syncher and Panner templates are located by following these directions:

Be sure that you have LodeStar 5.3.1 or better installed. If not, uninstall LodeStar through Control Panel and download the latest version at http://www.lodestarlearning.com/c_el.html

1) Launch Lodestar
2) Select Star Interactions > Find Stars on Internet
3) A page will load entitled, ‘Home of the Star Interaction’. Click on Brancher to the left.
4) The Brancher page will appear. Note that all of the new templates require Adobe Flasher Player 9 or above.
5) Scroll to the bottom of the page until you see Brancher.star.
6) Click on Brancher.star. The Template Download Helper will appear.
7) Click on Next. Then click on ‘Download Template’.
8) When you see the ‘Download completed’ message, click on Finish.
9) Click the return button to return to the main menu.
10) Find the Brancher template under File > New. (In some rare cases, it may not open. Simply restart LodeStar.)
11) Repeat these steps for Panner and Syncher.

Conclusion

Brancher, Panner and Syncher are built on a new lodestar Flash framework. These templates were commissioned by eFolio Minnesota http://www.efoliominnesota.com through the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system and made available by agreement to all colleges, universities and schools. They provide tremendous added power to the delivery of instruction through electronic media and add a new dimension to eLearning authoring.

Desire2Learn has improved its SCORM upload procedure in version 8.3. LodeStar users who have grown accustomed to the upload routine in Desire2Learn 8.2 will now have to adapt to a new procedure for D2L 8.3.

(Secondly, in the case of Minnesota State Colleges and Universities recent upgrade, some resources that were uploaded during the transition period from one D2L version to the new version were apparently not fully restored to the course after the upgrade. We apologize in advance if we are misinterpreting what happened, but clearly, some resources can’t be accessed and must be re-uploaded to D2L.)

Here are the basic steps for importing a LodeStar resource into Desire2Learn.
Prepare your export to match D2L 8.3 according to the following instructions:

1. Open your project
2. Select Tools >Metadata Application Profile
3. Select MODE.
4. Click on ‘Ok’. (You only need to do this once per computer.)
5. Select Tools > IMS Manifest Maker
6. Fill in the Manifest, especially Organization – Module Title and Organization – Topic Title
7. Click on ‘Save Manifest’ button. Close dialog box.
8. Select Export > Create Export File
9. Click on the ‘Next’ button, paying attention at every step to where your zip file will be saved.
10. Keep the default ‘SCORM 1.3 (Recommended)’ selected at the very end.
11. Pay attention to the location under Export File Name.
12. Click on ‘Create Export’ button.

Inside of D2L, do the following:

13. Go to your course.
14. Select ‘Manage Files’ (on the left hand side of the screen)
15. Select ‘Import/Export/Copy Components’ (on the left hand side of the screen)
16. Select the ‘Import Components’ radio button.
17. You will see the ‘What would you like to do?’ screen. Browse to the lodestar zip file in the exports folder.
18. Click Next. (Be patient. The upload process has started. You will see a progress bar at the bottom.)
19. D2L will now display the Preprocessing Progress at it completes reading the zip file (technically, the IMS content package). When you see green check marks, click on the ‘Next’ button.
20. You may leave ‘Do not overwrite the existing file’ selected if you wish. If you are re-uploading, you may want to select, ‘Overwrite the existing file.’ In either case, do not check ‘Import Metadata’ Do check, ‘Select All Components’. Click on the ‘Next’ button.
21. You will now see the ‘Confirm Import Selections’ screen. You should have ‘Import Metadata’ as unselected. You should also have ‘Import all Items’.
22. D2L will now complete the import of this course material. When you see all green check marks, you can simply return to your content. Do this by clicking on the word ‘Content’ next to ‘Course Home’ rather than clicking on D2L’s link. Doing the latter causes confusion.
23. You should now see your imported LodeStar resource.

These directions will be refined over time as we get some feedback from instructors. Good luck and stay tuned to this web journal for some interesting news in the near future.

Robert N. Bilyk

Recently, as a result of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Academic Innovations Projects, the question has been asked by participating instructors: “How do we share learning objects created with LodeStar?”

LodeStar is typically used by instructors to create learning activities that are uploaded to Moodle, Desire2Learn, Blackboard, eCollege, Sharepoint Learning Kit and so forth. But what happens when one instructor wants to share the learning resource with another instructor without a Learning Management System?

One scenario is that an instructor creates a learning object or activity and wishes to share the activity with an evaluator. The evaluator may or may not have LodeStar. Let’s examine the possibilities. We’ll cover the options from simplest and most general to most sophisticated.

Option 1: Share a Zip File

Turn your LodeStar activity into a Zip File and then share it. A Zip file is a popular archive format. That means that a zip file contains one or more files. A LodeStar activity is made up of multiple files -- but when zipped, can be passed around as a single file.

Think of it as a suitcase. We think of a suitcase as being one object, but it may contain several articles of clothing. Similarly, a Zip may contain one or more files that have been compressed in order to reduce their file size. To create a zip file you need a tool. The following is a list of popular zip making tools:

Winzip, a free download from http://www.winzip.com

AlZip, a free download from http://www.altools.com

PKZip, a free download from http://www.pkware.com

LodeStar also has a built in zip archive capability. To create and email a zip file created in LodeStar, do the following:

1) Open your project in LodeStar by selecting File > Open. Browse to your specific project folder and double-click on the file that ends with .lxml. This file is also associated with the LodeStar icon.

2) With your project opened, select Tools >IMS Manifest Maker in order to create a manifest. You must have a manifest in order to use the export utility in LodeStar, which is responsible for making the zip file. In the IMS Manifest Maker, we recommend you filling in at least the top five items. Then click on the ‘Save Manifest’ button. Close the dialog box.

3) Select Export >Create Export File. The Export Wizard will take you through a series of screens. The first screen will tell you that you are about to create an export from the current project. Similarly, a later screen will tell you that a new folder will be created in the LodeStar Exports folder. Another screen will prompt you to create a new folder name. Another will prompt you to create a filename name for your zip file, etc.

The last screen gives you the recommended option of exporting the activity as SCORM 1.3. This is the default type and so you don't need to do anything but click on the 'Create Export' button.

By default the zip file will be saved as:
C:\Program Files\LodeStar\Exports\[Project Name]\[File Name.zip]

You can accept the defaults. The main concern is for you to pay attention to where the zip file will be saved. You will need to know this information later.

Regardless of how you created the zip file (through Winzip, PKZIP, ALzip or LodeStar), you will need to know the location of the zip file.

You can email the zip file as an attachment, provided that your institution or email service allows attachments of this type.

The recipient of the attachment can then save the file to his or her hard drive and then unzip it. Unzip means to decompress the file or, in other terms, un-archive the file. This would be like opening the suit case and spilling out the contents.

The deflate utility that is used to unzip a file is built into both the Windows (XP or better) and MAC operating systems. In Windows, a user would right-click on the file and select extract to [folder name]. This will create a folder with the appropriate name. Inside the folder, the user will find another folder with the project name. Inside that folder, the user will find an index.htm file. Launch the index.htm file and the user can view the LodeStar Activity. If the user has a licensed copy of LodeStar, the user can click on the .lxml file that sits inside the folder. That will launch LodeStar and open the file for editing. When the user returns to LodeStar in a later session, this file name will be listed in their Most Recently Used List under File > New.

Option 2: Share a StarBurst

The benchmark for ease of sharing comes, in part, from Microsoft PowerPoint and the .ppt file. Because PowerPoint is widely used, instructors can easily share PowerPoint files. In Office 2007, the default PowerPoint file extension is .pptx. The x in pptx means Open XML , an open, transparent file type that is basically an archive (in the Zip family) with a controlling document and assets. When one shares a PowerPoint pptx file, one is essentially sharing a zip file with numerous documents inside. So, why can’t LodeStar do that? In fact, it can and has been doing so long before Open XML. The format is called StarBurst and the extension is .lxm.

When an instructor sends a StarBurst via eMail to another instructor with LodeStar, these are the capabilities:

In many cases, if the recipient has LodeStar loaded, he or she can simply right-click on the attachment and select ‘View’. This experience does vary from email system to email system, but generally, the activities such as Crossword, FlashCards, etc. simply appear.

The second capability is for the recipient to save the attachment to the hard drive and use LodeStar’s File > Open to open the StarBurst .lxm. The important caveat here is that the recipient must select File > Open and change the ‘Files of Type’ to .lxm.

When reading an .lxm, LodeStar will prompt the recipient to create a new project based on the .lxm. The new project's content will now be editable, but the original project will be left intact.

New activity templates such as SimpleAudioPlayer, SimpleVideoPlayer, Brancher, Panner and Syncher don’t support the quick viewing aspect of the LXM (the first capability), but they certainly support the second, editing capability.

LXM files should only be used for sharing or collaborating on a project. Students who use LodeStar to create multimedia projects can use the LXM format to send their work to the instructor by email and allow for quick viewing on the part of the instructor.

Option 3: Sharing through a Repository

The last option is by far the most sophisticated option and only practical for those engaged in large projects. The learning curve is high, but once mastered can provide a whole new level of security, collaboration and opportunity to present day computing.

The third option involves a free hosted repository like that offered by www.assembla.com. Recently, LodeStar Learning has collaborated with other companies through Assembla. Assembla makes it possible for us to collaborate on complicated projects that require version control. The collaborators can be anywhere in the world.

Teaching one how to use Assembla is beyond the scope of this article; however, computer science instructors at a college or university would easily be able to guide an instructor through the basic steps.

Using a repository like Assembla involves, in general, the following steps.
An instructor registers at www.assembla.com. and then creates a project space. This is essentially a place that acts as a repository, a place to store files.

Secondly, the instructor downloads a versioning software that follows Subversion Control or SVN, for short. The SVN software that I use is called TortoiseSVN and is available for free at http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org.

The instructor then creates a subdirectory on the hard drive that in linked to the project space in the assembla repository. The instructions that come with the Tortoise help files provide a step by step guide on how to accomplish this last step. The subdirectory must be empty at first. The link is then established. Files that are subsequently added to the directory can be committed to the repository. The repository enables an instructor to commit changes and download the edits of others. The Assembla repository also supports numerous collaboration tools such as a project site Wiki.

As I had mentioned, using a repository like Assembla involves a learning curve. The payback is that files are backed up, version controlled and open to collaboration.

Conclusion

In conclusion, mechanisms exist both inside and outside of LodeStar to share files before they are committed to a Learning Management System. Using a zip tool is easy and straightforward; using LodeStar’s StarBurst .lxm filetype is easy and straight forward, although less commonly used; and finally, Assembla.com offers collaboration on steroids. LodeStar Learning is currently collaborating with Saint Paul College in Minnesota through Assembla.

Postscript

In the future, LodeStar Learning would like to partner with a host to enable one-click publishing of content to a learning object repository where projects are easily viewable without login. We would be open to working together with a host who would be interested in bringing this new capability to instructors and students.

By Robert Bilyk

In anticipation of the upcoming release of the LodeStar Learning Masher template at the Minnesota eLearning Summit 2008, I thought I would seize the occasion to discuss the concept of mashups and their relevance to eLearning.

A mashup is a hybrid application. Although, instructors may not immediately recognize the term, we’ve seen mashups in action on the web. Applications like Google Earth can take us anywhere on the planet. When we arrive, we can elect to see additional data superimposed on the satellite image, such as restaurant and hotel information, flickr images, roads, and much more.

Mashups in eLearning offer instructors the opportunity of linking students to multiple sources of information. Suddenly the html page in Desire2Learn or Moodle springs to life with RSS feeds, podcasts, videos, web services, maps, snippets from social networks and more.

In case all of these terms aren’t familiar to you, I’ll take a moment to describe them. But first, I’d like to discuss the instructional relevance of mashups and some possible implications to student learning.

Let’s start with something we know: the traditional eLearning course. In the course, we define terms, describe procedures, suggest readings, lead discussions, foster interaction and strategically move students from a place of benightedness to enlightenment. Every word that we write on the page has significance – because everything we do is designed to help students meet the course objectives.

But the traditional eLearning course, like pre-Columbus Europe, can be somewhat narrow, static ...confining. In contrast, the internet is teaming with information, new insights, new discoveries, current events, new knowledge. Of course, that doesn’t make the internet a ‘good’ thing, and the traditional course ‘bad’. Instructors are quick to point out that the internet lacks design, censorship, editorial control, boundaries – it cares little for the student or the un-initiated.

Fortunately, instructors aren’t left with an either/or proposition. Instructors can design courses that build student skills incrementally but leave a little portal open for the world to come streaming in - in the form of syndicated feeds, podcasts, videos, maps, web services, and more. Suddenly the finite becomes infinite; the predictable invites a little mystery. The instructor producer may even become the consumer.

The combination of one or more of these web services in an application is called a mashup. Popular mashups include Google Maps, and lately Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly. Pipes and Popfly allow you to construct a page and include data from a variety of sources. An instructor can select a mapping service such as Microsoft Earth and combine that with real-time earthquake data. Students can arrive at their own conclusions about the Pacific Rim, for example, by viewing data rather than being told something in a paragraph. Students are given an opportunity to construct their knowledge.

Some of the data services that work well in a mashup are the following, most popular services:

RSS Feeds
Real Simple Syndication (there other variants to this acronym) is based on some code being able to check a website for updates on current events, blog entries, podcasts, and other frequently updated information. Pipes and Popfly and most wiki sites make it easy for the instructor to insert the code to make this magic happen on an otherwise static html page.

Maps
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft access maps created by Navteq, a company that drives around the world in satellite trucks collecting information about our planet. Through services like Microsoft, Navteq maps can be embedded in a web page and the map coordinated with data from yet another source.

Flickr
Flickr is a database of hundreds of millions of photographs posted by private citizens, community groups, and private groups. In support of mashups, Flickr photos can be geotagged. In other words, contributors can attach information on where the photograph was taken. When users move around in Google Earth or Yahoo Maps, for example, they can elect to see images taken near the geographical point of interest.

Video
The most popular of the video sites is YouTube. YouTube is a website where users can upload and view both homespun and professional video clips. YouTube is popular in mashups because it is relatively easy to paste a code snippet from YouTube into an html page.

Another popular site is blip.tv. Blip.tv is a favorite of mine because many of the submissions also include intellectual property information through Creative Commons. Blip.tv also features episodes of shows and offers an RSS feed so that a web page can show a listing of the latest episodes of a particular show.

Podcasts
Podcasts are the broadcasting of videos, audios and other digital content over the internet. The term originated from IPod users being able to download everything from newscasts to college lectures from the internet into their IPod device. The pairing of podcasts with RSS makes it easy for subscribers to a site to get updates on podcasts through their browser, ITunes software and other software that understands how to interpret an RSS feed (an RSS aggregator.)

Web Services
Web Services covers a range of technologies. Essentially, one computer can request information from another computer. Information can range from weather forecasts to archived weather data to movie listings to earthquake data to near real-time data from NASA spacecraft. Web Service technology might involve a computer server advertising certain functions that a remote computer can call or invoke to get the data or it could involve PHP scripts that get imbedded on an html page. A script is simply a bit of computer code that performs some action or causes something to happen.

Conclusion
An instructor can choose to make his or her course dynamic with the help of a mashup. The experience is dynamic in the sense that students can watch a video from within the course or listen to a podcast or view a map with course-related data superimposed on the map or any combination of the above. The effective use of these technologies starts with an understanding of what they are, but also how they can be applied towards increasing a student’s knowledge of the subject.

Editor’s Note:
The following Web Journal article is lengthy but contains relevant, to-the-point information that is critical to the successful use of lodeStar 5.2.9’s new SimpleVideoPlayer and SimpleAudioPlayer templates.

We ask our supporters to subscribe to this web journal and tell others about the journal. We have temporarily ceased the practice of mass mailing information to our subscribers and will rely on RSS subscriptions instead. LodeStar Learning relies almost exclusively on word-of-mouth. New users bring new revenue which helps us to build more templates that we provide freely to all of our users. So help spread the word, and we’ll keep focused on development.

LodeStar 5.2.9

We’ve released LodeStar 5.2.9 that includes two new templates, and we have anticipated four immediate questions.

LodeStar 5.2.9 includes SimpleVideoPlayer and the SimpleAudioPlayer. These two templates have powerful implications but can be easily misused.

SimpleVideoPlayer allows an instructor to paste in an address and display video that is progressively downloaded from its source into a flash video player. The end-user experience is a positive one. Students don’t need to search about for a suitable video player. If they have the Adobe Flash Player version 9 or better, it all just works.

Simple Audio Player allows an instructor to paste in the address of an mp3 file. With the LodeStar Audio Playback control, students don’t need to search for a suitable audio player. Again, if they have the Adobe Flash Player plug-in for their browser, it all just works.

But the release of these two new templates will raise some questions. We anticipate the following:
How do you use SimpleVideoPlayer to access YouTube?
When you preview video and audio files, you get a message related to Adobe Flash Player Security. How do you avoid this message?
How do you use SimpleAudioPlayer to access Podcasts?
And, lastly what about copyright?

This web journal entry will attempt to answer these questions.

Using YouTube
The SimpleVideoPlayer template is now available (lodeStar 5.2.9) under File > New. Based on our beta experience, we expect instructors to copy the addresses (from the address bar) of YouTube, and paste them into the SimpleVideoPlayer field. This won’t work. The YouTube address that is visible in the browser is not the primary media url or, in other words, the ‘real’ address. If you pasted the address that you see in the browser address field into SimpleVideoPlayer, the video player would not know how to find the video.

Savvy users will quickly imagine a solution to this problem. They might say, 'Just download the video using one of several available services, such as KeepVid or RealPlayer.' We believe, however, that the answer to this problem is not to download the video. There are three good reasons for not downloading from YouTube and then uploading video to a learning management system. First, videos are large files by nature. Uploading videos as common practice would quickly tap the resources of the institution or system. Imagine YouTube being duplicated across every learning organization across the continent – across the world. YouTube consumes something in the order of a terabyte per day. Can you imagine the cost? The second reason is that it is likely a violation of the Term of Service (TOS) of YouTube or similar web site. Thirdly, and probably most importantly, it is likely a violation of copyright.

The solution is to keep the video on its server of origin and simply point the video player control to its location. One can certainly also hyperlink to the video, but that strategy removes the student from the learning context, and exposes the learner to all of the distractions of YouTube itself – ads, related links, and non-related links.
Pointing the video player control to the video location means simply this: finding the ‘real’ address of the video and pasting it into the SimpleVideoPlayer. The ‘real’ address of the video ends with .flv.

The current issue with finding the ‘true’ address of a YouTube video is that YouTube obscures its primary media addresses. Several scripts have been written to retrieve a YouTube video from its location in the YouTube file system, but as of this writing, they no longer work. YouTube has changed.

Our temporary solution is to point instructors to http://www.blip.tv, instead, for two very important reasons. First, instructors can follow a simple procedure and reliably find the address of a video. Secondly, when Blip.TV is accessed through www.creativecommons.org and its search mechanism, an instructor can often find intellectual property information attached to the video.

So here is what you do with Blip.TV.

Select the LodeStar template entitled ‘SimpleVideoPlayer’.
Type in a project name. Our project name will be Sharks.
Go to http://blip.tv/
Type in a topic in the search field. In our example, we’ll type in ‘sharks’.
We find a good match, “Hammerhead Sharks”
Click on the video thumbnail.
The video will play, but we want the video playback as an flv (flash video).
Find the pull down menu below the menu. It is labeled ‘Play Episode as: Select a format.’
Select ‘source – Flash Video (.flv).
In the browser address bar you will see an address like the following:
http://blip.tv/file/44963?filename=Hula-HammerheadSharks688.flv
Copy this address into LodeStar, but then replace the 44963?filename= with /get/ so that you get:
http://blip.tv/file/get/Hula-HammerheadSharks688.flv
This is the primary media address for the hammerhead sharks video. Paste this into the field for SimpleVideoPlayer.
In LodeStar, preview your video.

Adobe Flash Player Security
When you first preview you get a message related to ‘Adobe Flash Player Security’. The reason for this message is that the Flash player is attempting to play a flash movie from your hard drive that is accessing a resource on the internet. Your students won’t get this message. They will be playing a flash movie from the internet accessing another resource on the internet. It is the hard drive to internet connection that is causing the Adobe Flash Player Security Complaint.

Here is how to remedy the issue for this project and other projects.
Preview the video. You might see the Adobe Flash Player Security dialog pop up. Click on Settings .

You will see the Adobe Flash Player Settings Manager appear.
Click on Edit Locations and then click on Add Location.
In the bottom field you will see something like this: C:\Program%20Files\lodeStar\Projects\SimpleVideoPlayer13\os.swf
Copy the following: C:\Program%20Files\lodeStar\Projects\
and paste it into the top field titled ‘Trust this location:’
Of course the location of your projects folder might be different than the example above. This tells the Adobe Flash Player to allow any swf file that is located in your projects folder to be able to send and receive information to the web.

You’re done. You can now close the browser. You won’t see security message again when using LodeStar projects.

SimpleAudioPlayer and Podcasts
Simple AudioPlayer does a wonderful job of playing back audio podcasts or any .mp3 file for that matter. Instructors can imbed a podcast directly in a course and be confident that students will be able to hear and control the podcast without any special player.
Here’s how. Launch Mozilla Firefox 2.0 or Internet Explorer 7. You can use older browsers, but this works best in the recent releases of Firefox and IE.

Go to Google.
In the Search, type in the following:
podcasts science filetype:xml
You will now see links related to science podcasts. Replace science with your field of interest.
Select Science Magazine Podcast or click directly on http://www.sciencemag.org/rss/podcast.xml

(If you are not using the latest browser you will see the xml file in its raw state. This might seem a little overwhelming. If you understand XML, you will see the direct addresses to the .mp3 files that contain the podcast. If you copy the address into the SimpleAudioPlayer and preview, you will hear the podcast.)

Rightclick on an MP3 file and then select Properties. Copy the address ending in .mp3. Example: http://podcasts.aaas.org/science_podcast/SciencePodcast_080328.mp3
If the address doesn’t end in .mp3, this will not work. Paste the address into SimpleAudioPlayer, then preview.

But what about Copyright?
Unless you understand the Technology , Education and Copyright Harmonization Act (TEACH ACT 2002) or, when the time comes, its successor, assume that simply copying a whole work like a video or a podcast violates someone’s copyright.

The TEACH ACT of 2002, however, does allow some uses of copyrighted material in a distance education context. An extract from the American Library Association makes a statement about this right: “[The TEACH Act] is built around permitting uses of copyrighted works in the context of "mediated instructional activities" that are akin in many respects to the conduct of traditional classroom sessions. The law anticipates that students will access each "session" within a prescribed time period and will not necessarily be able to store the materials or review them later in the academic term; faculty will be able to include copyrighted materials, but usually only in portions or under conditions that are analogous to conventional teaching and lecture formats. Stated more bluntly, this law is not intended to permit scanning and uploading of full or lengthy works, stored on a website, for students to access throughout the semester-even for private study in connection with a formal course.”

http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=Distance_Education_and_the_TEACH_Act&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=25939#newc

Before using SimpleVideoPlayer or SimpleAudioPlayer, or even before using LodeStar to capture images from the internet, review the TEACH Act and review your institution’s policy for using copyrighted works.

Finally, related to the issue of copyright, some content creators may explicity give others permission to copy and build upon copyrighted works under certain conditions. These rights are covered under http://creativecommons.org/ . LodeStar 5.2.9 includes a Creative Commons Intellectual Property workflow and includes a Creative Commons Search (Search 3) that helps instructors find images, audio, and videos that the authors intended to share.

Good luck in using LodeStar 5.2.9 and look forward to some great enhancements in the near future.