Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Blackboard Tip: Recommendations for Large File sizes and Posting Multimedia files to Blackboard

Blackboard Tip: Recommendations for Large File sizes and Posting Multimedia files to Blackboard

Following are some recommendations that make movies, PowerPoint’s, images and PDF easier for students to view in Blackboard.  In order for students to have faster access, we recommend that instructors posting multimedia files to a web page or Blackboard course follow to these file size guidelines.
PowerPoint and office Documents Use the tools available in Microsoft Office to reduce file size for PowerPoint and Word files. You can also save files as PDFs before uploading, which often makes smaller, read-only versions of the files. Compressing images in documents will reduce the file size. 

In Word or PowerPoint Click File- Select Save AS

Click Tools – Compress pictures


Choose the screen or email 96 ppi value. Click OK


Also saving documents that have images in them in PDF format will reduce file size significantly – for example a PowerPoint that is 6.99 MB became 1.14 MB when converted to PDF  from word or PowerPoint click file –Save as

From Save as type drop menu choose PDF

Choose minimum size- Click Save

Images
Most images should only be around 60k-100k; Large images are okay when required (e.g., Art courses); the image size should be 500k or less. Two recommended formats are JPEG for photographs    and GIF for computer generated text images. Use a graphics program to resize images for screen viewing before uploading. You can also use an online service such as http://www.shrinkpictures.com or http://www.picresize.com
Video:
It is recommended to embed your videos or link rather than upload to blackboard. You can upload your videos to AWC video or YouTube and Vimeo, or a separate media server on campus and then link to them within a course. Be mindful of intellectual property rules. For example, it might not be legal to host a video from National Geographic on YouTube, even if you licensed it to use in a course.
Course Files— look for large file sizes and unused or duplicate files and folders that you can delete.
From Control panel click Files and click the course name


Select the check box near the content you want to delete

Click delete


    Audio - Use software to resample or trim audio files to reduce their size.  Audio files uploaded to Blackboard should be no larger than 4MB. Recommended format is MP3. The best way to post an audio file to Blackboard is to make it a Podcast episode - that way the player for the audio is shown right in Blackboard and the student does not have to download the audio before listening to it.

No comments:

Post a Comment