Record and play

It has taken us some weeks of trial and error but finally we have come across convincing plugins to play and record audios on our Moodle platform.

Let me be clear about what I mean with convincing. For Renaat it is a series of technical vocabulary like free, stable, minimal and gitable. For me (let me be honest and ever so little ashamed), it is all that –taking his word for it–- plus the way the plugin looks on the page.

So we have settled for the Yahoo web player to play our audios and for Moodle’s own online audio recording assignment using Flash (10.1+).

The Yahoo web player has a sleek interface, familiar and contemporary, and offers some room for customization. You can minimize the player by ‘docking’ it in the margin the way Moodle docks its blocks. There was an issue at first with the docked player disappearing under the Moodle docking bar but Renaat found a solution, at least for the Chrome and Firefox browsers. IE will follow soon. There is little to add or improve on the online audio recording assignment. It is just excellent.

Of course, teachers who set this assignment, still have to grade the recordings of the student manually. With the current technology and digitalization of sound, it is perfectly possible to have a program evaluating the sounds and pronunciation of words and sentences.

That’s exactly what the language training site Babbel where I am currently learning Portuguese is doing. The words I utter into my microphone are immediately assessed and given a percentage. Less than 50% and I am not allowed to proceed. Imagine my pride when during the first lessons I regularly got a +80 when repeating the words pronounced by a clear slow female voice. After all, Portuguese is a hell of a language to pronounce. However, my pride took a serious dent during the more advanced modules, when my scores suddenly dropped to just above the pass mark. In these modules, Babbel uses different voices and let them speak at normal street velocity. But I noticed something else. I still scored higher when my familiar female voice was around. My results were worst when I followed a deep male bass voice. So I did a little test and imitated his low pitch. And yes, my scores went up. There are still some flaws to the automatic grading of sounds, it seems.