Live data from Hacker News

How I Teach Classes Remotely

blog.ifost.org.au

11–20 of 104 posts

Re: How I Teach Classes Remotely

#11
What apps exist to allow for directional "paper" where both (say, given an iPad) can do collaborative writing, if you're doing something like math which needs birectional communication?

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

Re: How I Teach Classes Remotely

#13
I commented on the blog post, but:

> 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.

Re: How I Teach Classes Remotely

#14
post #7

OP, I'd be curious to hear more how you structure your lessons for an online environment. This post mostly details how you [technically] teach online classes. For the many teachers who are now in a remote environment, what should they know about online learning vs traditional classroom learning?

I enjoyed this paper by Doug Schmidt of Vanderbilt on what it was like to teach a comp-sci MOOC at Coursera:

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.

Re: How I Teach Classes Remotely

#15
post #13

I commented on the blog post, but: > 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’…

I would find this helpful can you post a link to an OBS plugin for VMs. Thanks

Re: How I Teach Classes Remotely

#16
post #9

This appears to be a sales post, with a bunch of affiliate links. 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

The strangest part was the weird piping through Amazon Workspaces to not accidentally show your popups? This is a sector game streamers have already perfected, you only need OBS, and you want to only capture individual windows, preferably not your browser ever.

OBS is super complicated for non tech-savvy users, so it’s probably not a great option, but some video sharing systems (I want to say Zoom?) can target a specific window.

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.

Re: How I Teach Classes Remotely

#17
post #13

I commented on the blog post, but: > 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’…

I have an even better suggestion: Put your computer in DoNotDisturb mode while streaming. No messages popup ever.

Re: How I Teach Classes Remotely

#18

What apps exist to allow for directional "paper" where both (say, given an iPad) can do collaborative writing, if you're doing something like math which needs birectional communication? 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 wou…

There are many online collaborative whiteboards. Those are the keywords you need to search for. I can't really recommend one since they all seem to have serious flaws. But for your use case, one might suffice.

Re: How I Teach Classes Remotely

#19

What apps exist to allow for directional "paper" where both (say, given an iPad) can do collaborative writing, if you're doing something like math which needs birectional communication? 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 wou…

There are many online collaborative whiteboards. Those are the keywords you need to search for. I can't really recommend one since they all seem to have serious flaws. But for your use case, one might suffice.

Thanks for the keywords, that's what I was kind of lookin for. I appreciate your response.

Re: How I Teach Classes Remotely

#20
post #15
post #13

I commented on the blog post, but: > 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’…

I would find this helpful can you post a link to an OBS plugin for VMs. Thanks

OBS is "Open Broadcaster Software" https://obsproject.com/
Post reply on HN