Ed-Tech @ DU

As you create your galleries for fall courses, I wanted to draw your attention to an issue in CourseMedia™ and how you can work around it.

As you know, we’ve been uploading images to CourseMedia™ for several years now. Technology has changed since then — projectors and monitors display images of higher resolution, disk space and network speed aren’t as limiting as they used to be, and standards have changed. What this means for you is that some of the older images you’ll find in CourseMedia™ will appear pixelated when you project them. Here’s what you can do:

1. Try to use newer images in your galleries. How do you know if you are looking at a “newer” image? Two ways:
   • Newer images will usually appear at the bottom of your search results (see below, and please excuse the rudimentary graphics).

   

   • If you click into the medium-size view (from the search results page, NOT from your gallery), you can glean some information from the URL. In the illustrations below, you’ll see a portion of the URL highlighted.
     
     
     The ObjectID number (for the most part) designates the order in which images are added to the repository. Lower numbers were added early on and may be of lesser quality. Higher numbers were added more recently, and are likely of higher quality. ObjectID = 49 means that this was the 49th record added to CourseMedia™ (and probably the 49th image). ObjectID = 24409 means that this was the 24,409th image added (approximately). Note that some low-numbered images have been replaced with higher quality reproductions, however…
   • View the full-screen versions of the images before you add them to your galleries.
2. Send me an e-mail (Leslie.Trumble@du.edu) if an image is too pixilated — sometimes it’s an extremely easy fix and will take a matter of minutes to replace the poor image. If this isn’t the case, we can certainly be on the lookout for a higher-quality replacement.

I know this is a bit of a pain, and I’m going to work on finding efficient ways to upload better images to replace some of our early scans. I appreciate your patience and your help in identifying which images (of the estimated 10,000 or so that should be replaced) we should make our highest priority.