Voicethread is a tool that FITS has recommended to faculty for several years. For the past two years we’ve had a site license, giving all of our faculty and students access to the pro features, but we’ve been shy of promoting it too widely. While it’s a great tool, there were some oddities to the workflow of using it, which meant that we were more comfortable helping faculty use it while working closely with a FITS consultant rather than putting some resources online and hoping that instructors would figure it out on their own. It was on “the secret menu,” one might say.
Recently, Voicethread has provided some updates that might make it a little better for a wider audience, but it still has its quirks. For those instructors who may have been introduced to Voicethread in the past and decided it wasn’t right for you, I offer this review of the new version of Voicethread.
What is Voicethread?
Voicethread is a slideshow and asynchronous discussion tool. It’s used in a couple of ways by instructors, particularly in online and hybrid classes:
- To create interactive online lectures. Many times when an instructor is starting to move content online, they look at the option of doing a screencast of a PowerPoint lecture, and they see a gap between that technology and what they’ve been doing in class. There’s no way to pose a probing question in the middle of the lecture or allow for on-the-spot questions. Voicethread is the best solution we’ve found to bridge that gap without killing one of the main benefits of online learning to students and requiring them to be online at a certain time for a synchronous videoconference.
- To allow students to create narrated presentations. There are lots of tools that allow for this. But considering the many versions of PowerPoint students may have, with different workflows for recording and sharing a presentation, it’s sometimes easier to have students do this in a tool that the university pays for and which is already integrated into D2L.
To see what this actually looks like, peruse through the Voicethread Browse page, where Voicethreads that have been made public are available to view.
New D2L Integration
Voicethread is a third-party tool, but through the magic of LTI integration (learning tools interoperability) it can masquerade as a native part of the learning management system. You can log into Voicethread through D2L and access or create content for your class from D2L.
This integration is the most notable change in the last few months.
Just as before, you can create an “External Learning Tools” link through D2L that will automatically log users in to Voicethread and create an account for them if they don’t already have one.
Previously this link would only go to the Voicethread home page, and if you wanted to link your students to a specific Voicethread that you created, you would need to post a separate link to it. Now, when you create this link, you are given the choice of linking to a specific Voicethread, to a “class page” where students can add and share their own Voicethreads, or to the Voicethread home page as before.
No matter which kind of link you create, once students click it, they will automatically get a Voicethread account if they don’t already have one and be logged in.
The interactive lecture
If you click the “Individual VT” link, you’ll be prompted to select a Voicethread you’ve already made or you can create a new one from right there.
This new LTI makes it easier to share the link to a closed group. In the past, we’ve had instructors just grab a shareable link from within Voicethread and paste it somewhere on D2L. This meant that it’s possible for students to create a separate account and post inane or offensive comments onto the Voicethread without the instructor being able to track who had done it—while it is rare, it has happened.
Student Narrated Presentations
If you select the “Course View” button above, then this link will instead go to a gallery of all Voicethreads that have been shared with the class. Students have the option to add their own Voicethread to that gallery, either by creating a new Voicethread or selecting a pre-existing Voicethread if they have one. If they create a new one, they’re given a simple three-step process of adding media for the slides, recording comments, and then sharing it with the class.
If you have more than one assignment where students are creating a Voicethread, things can get messy. With the Voicethread D2L integration, there is no way to group Voicethreads by assignment–they all go into one big gallery on the class page. I’d recommend enforcing a naming convention if you have more than one assignment. (Note: Voicethread has an “Assignment” feature that addresses this problem, and more, but as of this writing, it doesn’t work in D2L.)
The big workflow problem for students is sometimes a student will start working on a Voicethread but then need to log off before they finish it and share it with the class. In this case, when they come back to the “Course View” there is no way to continue working on a Voicethread they have already started–they either have the option to share what they’ve already created as is or create a brand new one. The workaround is a counter-intuitive trip to the Voicethread home page to find the Voicethread they’ve already started and then going back to the class link after they finish to share it.
As I said before, the LTI integration allows Voicethread to masquerade as a native D2L tool, but often the illusion is incomplete, and it can be jarring for users who expect it to function as any other LMS tool.
Fine Print
Whatever option you select for the External Learning Tools link, there’s a caveat: your selection will only be retained for this section of the course. If you copy the course in D2L, you need to click on each Voicethread link in the new section and select what in Voicethread you want to link to again. However, this is sort of a good thing–because if you’re linking to an individual Voicethread that has student comments, you’ll want to create a new, clean copy of that Voicethread without those comments for the new quarter anyways (which is easy to do). But in a perfect world, Voicethread would do this automatically when you copy a course in D2L. After all, who wants more work when you’re re-offering a course?
And this becomes a much bigger problem if a different instructor teaches the course. Copying the D2L course does not copy the actual Voicethread from the account of the original instructor to the new instructor, so the original instructor has to go back into Voicethread and share each Voicethread with the new instructor by email address. Then the new instructor needs to create a copy so that student comments from one class don’t show up in another. Then they need to go into their D2L course site and make sure all the existing LTI links are connected to the correct Voicethreads. It’s both time-consuming and difficult to explain exactly what is going on when training instructors.
There’s a problem on the D2L side of the integration too. While D2L allows instructors to change the names of External Learning Tools links in Content and add dates and restrictions, you cannot add a description to these items like you can for native D2L content. What’s worse, is that D2L allows you to enter a description–but it is never saved. If you enter a description, leave the module and come back—poof—it’s gone. This makes it a lot harder to give students specific instructions and supplemental information when you have a Voicethread-based assignment.
New User Interface
In addition to the new integration, Voicethread also had a major user interface change within the last year that fixed a few annoyances with the product.
- They added a full-screen button, a great bonus feature when uploaded slides or images have small text.
- Images and slides upload at higher resolution, again helping with readability.
- The comment layout has become scrollable and better laid out. Previously, if one person made two comments they were grouped together in a single icon, which was confusing. Now each comment has a separate icon.
These are all great upgrades. My favorite part of the new user interface is how great it looks when linked as a content item within D2L. D2L will display a Voicethread within a frame, and the presentation will automatically fill that frame both widthwise and heightwise. Here, it’s a pretty seamless experience.
Threading and feedback
In the past, one reason we would sometimes recommend a text-based discussion over Voicethread was lack of support for threaded discussions. Voicethread recently released three new features that all get at this idea.
- Direct Reply – Direct reply doesn’t create a threaded discussion—rather it creates a new comment directly underneath the comment you’ve replied to. This could be useful if you want to interject a quick point to something someone else said, but the way it’s implemented could create potential confusion, because if someone else makes a direct reply to the same comment after you do, that comment will now appear immediately underneath it and your comment will be moved down. If you reply “I agree—great point!” and it would look like you were responding to a comment that was created after yours.
- Private Reply – You can now easily make a direct reply to someone that only he or she will see. Most commonly, I see this being useful for instructors giving feedback or for students asking question that only pertain to them. Recipients should get an email if you reply to them, but it depends on the notification settings they’ve set up in Voicethread.
Note that anyone with access to a Voicethread can make a private reply to any comment. I wish instructors could exercise a little bit more control here and be able to prevent private comments between students or have access to them.
- Threaded Comments – Threaded replies need to be enabled in your playback settings for each Voicethread, but they do exactly what you’d expect–they allow for a conversation around a specific comment with a conversation visually set off from top-level comments. When threading is enabled, it replaces the option for direct replies. This is good, as a way to minimize confusion.
Other than the potential confusion of direct reply, these are all welcome additional features. I only wish threading was enabled by default or could be enabled globally.
Remaining problems
An issue that’s popped up in the last year or so, which isn’t directly Voicethread’s fault, is that browsers like Chrome and Firefox have started putting additional security checks on microphone and webcam access. The web version of Voicethread is flash-based, and flash has always given you a warning when an application needs to access these features, but now Chrome and Firefox ask for permission as well. This would be okay, but the icon to grant permission is easy to miss, and if something isn’t working, users might not know why. I’d like to see Voicethread give some better browser-specific guidance on where to click to enable access.
One problem I’ve run into which has not been addressed by the recent updates is the inability to restrict comment type in a Voicethread. Many instructors are using Voicethread specifically because it allows audio comments–like instructors in modern languages. I would like to see a setting where the author could disable text commenting. As it is, instructors with these kinds of assignments can only specify in their instructions what kind of comments students should be making.
Verdict
I appreciate that Voicethread is going in the direction of making its product look and behave like just another part of the learning management system–online instructors and students can quickly get “tool” fatigue with multiple tools with their own logins and organizational hierarchies. The problem is that it’s not quite there, and this may make things worse for some users. By setting up a mental model for how the tool works, users may be frustrated later on when the integration is less than seamless, like when you try to copy the course or when your students need to return to the Voicethread home page to continue working on a Voicethread before they can share it.
Still, these features are welcome additions, and I feel more comfortable in recommending the tool now. But I still think instructors who are using it may need support from their instructional technologists when they inevitably run into the quirks.