How I Teach Classes Remotely
blog.ifost.org.au
blog.ifost.org.au
What I like with this approach is that you can fully control your scene.
> If you are presenting a computer desktop (e.g. I teach programming classes, so I do a lot of this), then get your IT department to organise an Amazon Workspace for you. Join the conference call from twice — once from your laptop, and once from the Workspaces session. Share the Workspaces screen, not your home laptop. That way, if a message pops up on your screen, the students won’t see it.
I can recommend a better option (in my opinion): use a VM to "house" the work you're doing and then using OBS to broadcast that VM's window to Zoom/whatever using a OBS->Webcam plugin.
I do this and if you get in touch (I'm in Australia too; Brisbane) I'd be happy to share my setup and show you an example of the work it renders.
Is it mainly to avoid the problem of a message popping up on your screen?
It also means I can run the VM at 720p but my desktop at 1440p. Using a terminal in a 720p VM window is PERFECT for showing text in a console, allowing the text to be very highly visible/readable without having to use zoom in features.
You can also snapshot the VM once it's in a working/desired state (which can be configured using Ansible in minutes) and then produce clones for use for different reasons.
You can craft the perfect development environments and even have them talking to each other on an internal NAT network inside of VirtualBox.
If I understand what you are doing correctly, in Zoom you will either select the camera with the VM window in it (which OBS is creating a virtual camera for), or you select the real camera. So the attendees for the session either see you, or they see the content: but not both at the same time.
Is that right?
Unless you run OBS in the virtual machine, and join the Zoom session from the virtual machine too, in which case OBS is unnecessary.
And if you do that then I'm not sure what that's gaining over just sharing one window of your desktop (the VM window) in Zoom.
No. With the correct configuration in OBS, they can see both - you and the screen. This is the latest video I have uploaded to demonstrate the visual effect I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgXhH5VK1pE
> Unless you run OBS in the virtual machine, and join the Zoom session from the virtual machine too, in which case OBS is unnecessary.
Hmm?
I run OBS on the Windows 10 host system. That system is operating at 1440p @ 165Hz. The VM is operating at 720p at 60Hz. OBS uses the VirtualBox window to represent the VM as a source. I then use my mirrorless camera (Sony A6000 via a capture card) as my "web cam", and green screen my self over the top of the VM window in OBS. I use my Rode NT-USB microphone as an audio source and then mute the desktop audio.
You can then use one of a few plugins for OBS to present the output of all of this as a virtual web cam, which can be presented to Zoom as your camera. Your audience then see your combined efforts in OBS all rendered together to produce something akin to what you see in the video.
But OBS then gives you another trick (among many): scenes. You can transition between scenes really easily. Here's another example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-409oJ9mBA&t=1h03m35s -- this example demonstrates two things.
Firstly that a green screen allows you to increase the possibility of eye contact with your audience by bolstering your size in the frame without having a rectangle of mess behind you (see the video I posted above as an example of what a green screen now looks like.)
Secondly with OBS you can use smooth transitions to move between scenes which can include stinger transitions, but more importantly those scenes can contain everything and anything. For example I use a could of scenes: one for really up close view of me as I talk to the camera and a focus on me is important; and a second scene in which the terminal/screen is important and I'm smaller and boxed into the lower bottom-right side of the screen (as seen in the first video), shifting the focus to the content and not me.
This all comes with a few key benefits...
Using a VM means I can use Windows for OBS and several other tools, but I can run Ubuntu/Linux inside the VM for the better tooling and terminal emulation.
It also means I can run the VM at 720p but my desktop at 1440p. Using a terminal/window in a 720p VM window is PERFECT for showing text in a console ("720p is the target resolution. In pixel terms this is 1280x720. We've gotten the best results when we record at 1280x720(HiDPI) mode, giving an effective visible resolution of 1280x720, but extremely crisp." - https://egghead.io/articles/recording-a-great-coding-screenc...), allowing the text to be very highly visible/readable without having to use zoom in features live or in post.
You can also snapshot the VM once it's in a working/desired state (which can be configured using Ansible in minutes) and then produce clones for use for different reasons. These clones can diverge off on a crazy tangent without you having to worry about losing the original (working) state.
You can craft the perfect development environments and even have them talking to each other on an internal NAT network inside of VirtualBox. So you can create networks of systems to demonstrate network connectivity issues, security or just the standard client/server model.
Using a VM also produces a better alternative to "Do Not Disturb" because DND cannot protect you from accidentally showing private/sensitive information live on stream when you alt-tab to the wrong window.
Ultimately use what tools and methods work for you. I've found that emulating high-end Twitch streamers meant that I could have a very high production value and loads of tricks up my sleeve for close to zero cost.
Hope this helps.
EDIT: I forgot I had this video I did on CI/CD for Chester University in England. It's a big download (sorry) but this is how I use OBS and the above to do university lectures: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xT31CU8Lfob88FxaDXAVWy-uXC... (skip to about the 3m mark for the slides)
disclaimer: I'm a founder
But your current versions have one critical flaw: you'll lose data if you're on a spotty internet connection. After a month of having to email your support to "restore my videos" I just gave up and switched to using OBS and Dropbox to share these videos.
I love, love your product. But without a more reliable upload (or being able to access my recording locally) it's too big of a gamble to use on a regular basis.
Any chance fixing this (for spotty connection folks) is on the roadmap? I'd be fine if I could just upload my own videos as well.
In any case I (almost) love your product. I expect you'll be really, really big. It's a good experience overall (when it works).
Too bad, really. Loom seemed nice.
http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/~schmidt/PDF/POSA-MOOC.pdf
Section 3.1.1 "Filming High Quality Video Lectures" is especially good:
> After teaching courses on object-oriented software patterns and frameworks for two decades, it's become second nature to present lively and inspiring lectures despite minimal rehearsal and ad hoc slides. This haphazard model of preparation does not work in a MOOC since there are no students to interact with while filming the videos in the studio. As a result, we needed to produce much tighter scripts and highly structured lecture material.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2020/03/teache...
One tip was "Teachers are using the hashtag #virtualschool on Twitter to share resources."
Other tips from https://www.edutopia.org/article/what-teachers-china-have-le... were
-- Start by continuing to use lessons that are clear and simple, and don’t introduce new programs for teachers and students to learn if you can help it.
-- When building digital lessons, it’s helpful to reduce the number of external links on your online learning platform. For example, if you want students to read an article, it’s safer to upload a PDF (to OneDrive or GoogleDrive), rather than a link to an external site that may or may not work.
-- Many of our classes at school intentionally used workbooks and paper-based tasks instead of laptops to reduce students’ screen time.
I had a similar experience to point (3) when an online course I did included being given other students' short computer programs to comment on and make suggestions about.
Then there are things you can do face-to-face that are really difficult remotely which you just have to avoid.
These include: - students doing anything long on their own - teaching interactive programs
These are related problems.
If students are going to do an exercise on their own, it needs to be small enough that it's possible for them to post the whole thing that they've done into the chat channel.
So it's nearly impossible to teach how to use an interactive program that has a lot of hidden screens. (e.g. teaching Qlik remotely is hard; Tableau tends to be easier because you can post a screenshot).
(If you want to teach those things, it's better to create a simulation for it e.g the kind of thing that e-learning authoring tools like Articulate does.)
So put together, you end up with short-ish theory session followed by a 30 second exercise, followed by another short-ish theory session, and so on until the end of the time.
If there is substantive work to be done (e.g. some mathematics practice work), that needs to be students submitting something into a LMS (learning management system), not something you do in a classroom. That kind of thing works for me because I've only got adult learners; I don't know how it would work for younger students.
Of course you follow all the guidelines from whoever is sponsoring the course, which often entails wrapping everything in a pre-defined sandwich of "this is what we did last lesson; this is what you will learn; this is what you just learned; this is what we will cover next lesson" -- if that's the kind of thing the sponsor wants to see.
I think it gives a nice balance of being lead with prepared resources and engaged with rapid feedback and peer learning to solve hard tasks.
https://figshare.com/articles/Collaborative_Learning_Framewo...
Perhaps the actual products are good, but the credibility drops substantially as he has monetary incentive to list these things.
edit: It seems like the post author is acting in good faith
He's providing valuable knowledge, and sharing his extensive experience, during a time when it's beginning to be really rather quite important. Affiliate links are a perfectly acceptable norm and, frankly, don't disadvantage you in the slightest (in fact they give you an advantage in some cases: discounts, free months of services, and more.)
I'll be very surprised if I make any money from them anyway since the target audience (teachers and students) would get krisp for free, for example.
You can't satisfy all of the critics all of the time.
And as to the Workspace thing, it is super handy to have a immediately revertable system for any kind of demo so it’s controlled and you can reset if something goes wacky, and a Workspace (or Citrix or whatever) specifically is handy because it doesn’t eat CPU/RAM which streaming HD video typically wants a lot of.
Those tools too can capture individual screens, but then how do you do a PowerPoint presentation when you only have one monitor?
Are there other solutions? Seems like something that Zoom should be able to do — you share your screen and video your face on a recorded session. Then afterward you can go back and choose which stream (face or screen) is used at any given point in time.
Your best bet is to take the low-tech approach and distribute the slides seperately in pdf form.
You just hit the "record" button in Zoom and it works.
This of course makes sense because we were operating remotely; if your wife is teaching in a lecture theatre then that's a different kind of thing. Likewise, if she is creating lectures to be viewed offline, then the cost and effort goes up, and she's now going to be spending all her spare waking hours editing video.
With my little experience in video editing, I'd say 30-45 min for a whole lecture is very optimistic, so maybe this would be an easier solution.
To clarify, basically the desire is to be able to sit in front of a computer, look through slides while talking to the camera, and then afterward go through and (easily) choose which segments should show the screen and which should show your face. And hopefully the audio would just auto-sync, so you don't have to fiddle with it to get the lips to line up when it's set to show your face.
Camtasia is a licenced ($300) tool, but has almost fool proof editing and post production
In OBS you can create Scenes with multiple video sources. The scene will be the output you see in the video file. You can add the video sources as layers into the scene, scale and move them around. So you could create a scene where the main focus is on the PowerPoint slides and the webcam is just in the corner. The other scene would be the other way around. Then, while recording, you can switch between the scenes to show the powerpoint or the webcam.
This does not allow for as much flexibility in post, but it would save a lot of time since you don't have to edit the video afterwards. Also, the audio should be in sync as well.
In short: get OBS installed and started. Then add the web cam as a camera source to the default scene. Then load up PowerPoint, Google Slides, whatever, and add that window as a "Windows Source". Make sure the web camera is above the "Window Source" in the list of sources - they're like layers on a cake. You can edit the web camera source in the live preview to then be a box in one of the lower corners (this is called picture-in-picture).
I recommend crafting the slides to support having a picture-in-picture setup.
Here's a (very large, sorry) example lecture I did for Chester University in England: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xT31CU8Lfob88FxaDXAVWy-uXC... -- skip to about 3-4 minutes in to see how I'm presenting the slides, then jump to about 22m in to see how I present a terminal for programming needs.
Reach out and let me know if I can help you or your wife with this. I'm keen to help anyone having to go remote for this sort of thing.
https://screencast-o-matic.com/tutorial/welcome-to-screencas...
My father runs a tutoring business and most students want to move to skyping but I know my father wants to be able to write on something (paper would be ideal, but obviously not practical given the current environment, but an iPad would work) and have the student see it in real time, and then the student also writes in real time and have my father see it in real time.
What did Khan Academy guy Sal do in the early years to do collaborative lessons?
Thanks
This has a two way whiteboard system, and is also open source!
https://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2012/04/de-mystifyin...
https://sites.rmit.edu.au/sister/2020/02/28/which-recording-...
It also links to how to guides
Hmm, maybe to explain how informal, I should post links to some bits of my units that can be seen outside the uni:
On the low-end, this has the first couple of weeks of my Scala unit, taught to a small on-campus and larger online cohort. (Minus quizzes and assessment). https://theintelligentbook.com/willscala/ So far, so traditional (but you'll already spot a mix of desktop recordings and in-class recordings).
This is some stuff I've been putting together as "outreach" that goes alongside another of our courses (try in Chrome, slow in Firefox): https://theintelligentbook.com/circuitsup/ Though that's partly just me doing a "redux" on interactive smart materials from my PhD many years ago
For more "social" courses (HCI, Software Development Studio), I have an open source (but badly documented) system I built for students to submit videos to each other for critique. 2016 paper describing it here: http://2016conference.ascilite.org/wp-content/uploads/ascili...
I also use Slack extensively in some units.
Desktop recording usually via OBS, though I used to just use Quicktime when recording on my Macbook Pro. On the "what do you desktop-record with?" side, I tend to use an AudioTechnica AT2020 condenser microphone via a Scarlett 2i2 into the computer. That way it rarely needs any post-production as it's fairly clear in the raw recording.
The main thing is to remember that although they like you to be somewhat watchable, they're usually more led by what you want them to do. Assessments, tutorials, etc. It's not watched end-to-end like Netflix shows. So be personable, but don't feel you need to panic too much about high production values.
Pardon that being a quick and rough post - there's lots of good comments on here already.
Also, it just went Freemium, comes with 120min/week free noise cancellation.
More here: https://krisp.ai/blog/covid19-response/
(I'm the CEO & Co-Founder)
This has different context depending on what you mean... is it a drawing tablet or some sort of Android tablet?
It is really so much safer to watch pr0n in incognito tabs?
Incognito mode is for keeping your browsing history "clean" on your end. So that if your friend or relative uses your computer, he/she does not stumble upon stuff you don't wont to see.
Somehow I never had an issue with that.
It's especially to prevent it from showing up in autocomplete. Imagine you tell your mother to look up a plane ticket on Priceline, she types "p" into the address bar, and all of a sudden 8 different porn videos show up as the top 8 autocomplete suggestions.
Now if she's polite she probably won't say anything and you'll never know. But...
I just never had a problem with my family or friends to see that I watch porn.