Operating System (e.g. Windows, MacOS, Linux): Windows,Linux
Browser (e.g. Chrome, Firefox, Safari): Firefox
Channel (Name of the channel you were working on): Khan Academy
Description of problem:
We have a problem with Kolibri studio and we don’t know how to solve it. Maybe we did something wrong.
Already some years we are improving the educational facilities in an orphanage and associated High school in Ethiopia.
We explained Laura the past that for class room teaching the audio and video quality of the Khan video-lectures is insufficient.
Therefore we are using Kolibri studio: we first load the video-lectures and exercises in a channel and in the next step we replace the videos in HD video’s.
By doing this quite soon we run into storage problems; we have now 10Gb available, but to load all the HD videos we want, we need to publish each channel several times into the Kolibri app environment running on a windows PC.
In the past we were able to publish a channel to the app, delete a number of videos in Studio to make room for other videos.
If we then downloaded the new version of the channel the app, the videos deleted in Studio, were untouched in the app.
But now we discovered that these deleted videos are also deleted in the app. Luckily we made an export of this channel, so we have still the HD-videos of that channel.
Can anyone help us to escape this deadlock? Is it possible to upload automatically the videos of the app back into Kolibri studio?
It seems the issue you are facing is due to storage limitations on Studio? The videos that you are uploading are higher resolution versions of the Khan Academy videos, is that correct? Can you give me a sense of what resolution the videos are that you are using and what language? Also, if the resolution of the videos has been an issue for anyone else, this is something that we could try to address more generally.
You are right about the storage limitations, but we have good reasons to do so.
If we are using the low-resolution Khan videos in a typical Ethiopian class - characterized by poor lighting and poor acoustics - students are not motivated to listen to the excellent explanations by Salman Khan and others. Video lessons are a good addition to the classroom due to both clear explanations and clear drawings.
In Ethiopia the textbooks used for High School are in English, so by listening to the video lectures they will improve their English as well.
The conditions in a classroom must be as optimal as possible to ensure that students benefit maximally from the lessons.
The KaLite system has the high-definition video-lectures, as we experienced before.
It would be an advantage not only for Ethiopian students, if Learning Equality shout offer the Kahn video lectures in two different resolutions: HD for classroom teaching and low resolution for tablet and smartphone usage.
Another possibility would be that we have more storage capacity, let’s see 30 Gb, in Kolibri studio, so we can make our own channel in HD-quality.
And yes, we are willing to share our channels with others if they are interested.
Yes - I think the easiest thing to do might be for me to build a new version of the Khan Academy channel with the HD videos for you to test out. We can then explore the best way to update the existing channel with these videos as an optional upgrade (which Kolibri doesn’t currently support very well, in terms of having the alternative resolutions) as a longer term fix, and as a way to make this more broadly available to the community.
I’ll try to start a run of the automated script we use to do this, with this modification, to run over the weekend, then we can see where it’s at on Monday. As a former Physics teacher, I am very happy to continue to help people learn the phunnest subject there is!
Just to follow up here, I did start this process, but have hit some technical blockers during the automated import process, I’ll keep you updated as we overcome these.
Hello Richard, the new yellow user interface looks very good.
Having nothing heard so far, I understood there are still technical blockers.
What if, for the time being, you grant me more storage space in Kolibri studio, so I can add the high definition video’s by hand.
KInd regards, Julia
Apologies - we’ve overcome most of the technical difficulties, so I should be able to share a channel this week. Just to verify is a resolution of 854 × 480 workable for you? That’s the size we are able to easily get from Khan Academy for higher resolution videos at the moment.