What she did is really cool - the article though sucks. I want to know how she did this. But apart from the video talking about "a few LEDs" there isn't much to go on.
USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
31–40 of 108 posts
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#32OBS is really the big enabler in (my) online teaching at the moment. I use an IPad with a drawing app, I draw on a predefined colored canvas and overlay it in OBS with a chromakey filter. If that is available to you, it is even cheaper. But then again, I am looking slightly down while writing..
Any link to a tutorial on how to set this up? Thanks!
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#33Huh it looks like she horizontally mirrors the camera so that the writing appears forwards not backwards. At first I thought she might have been writing in reverse, which would be doable on simple graphs but harder with more words. Later shots show her writing on-camera, forwards from her perspective.
In the past century, glass chalkboards and reverse writing were actually used in the military, mainly in air defense. Specially trained writers were putting objects scanned by radars on the board with coordinates and related info, while officers were reading them from the other side.
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#34Whoa this is awesome. I would like to buy/build one of these for my home office? What's the best guide or best pre-built? Honestly I'd rather just throw money at someone whose built one for me. But either way is fine.
Lots of info here: https://lightboard.info/
Also lots of places to buy them. Here's one: https://www.desktoplightboard.com/product/desktop-lightboard...
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#35OBS is really the big enabler in (my) online teaching at the moment. I use an IPad with a drawing app, I draw on a predefined colored canvas and overlay it in OBS with a chromakey filter. If that is available to you, it is even cheaper. But then again, I am looking slightly down while writing..
Same! I don't do anything as elaborate as the article, but I use a combination of OBS, PowerPoint, GIMP, IDEs, and a cheap Wacom tablet to demonstrate all the concepts for my classes.
The "Khan Academy"-style drawing I think really helps keep learning online casual and conversational in a way just presenting slides doesn't.
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#36OBS is really the big enabler in (my) online teaching at the moment. I use an IPad with a drawing app, I draw on a predefined colored canvas and overlay it in OBS with a chromakey filter. If that is available to you, it is even cheaper. But then again, I am looking slightly down while writing..
Were you using Zoom? I had a lot of trouble using either the OBS virtual camera or sharing the composition window---what was transmitted was either potato quality or the video lagged very far behind. After a LOT of debugging, I'm convinced it was due to Zoom bandwidth throttling, which I was unable to get waived.
Using Zoom with OBS (virtual camera) works fine for me.
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#37Not sure why this title has "goes viral", it is nothing new. Almost 8 years ago, Dr. Jules White explained a simpler setup(at least IMO as less software) in very detail with a Mirror: Building a Low-cost Lightboard for Video Lectures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYwXOLU4TKk
Thanks for sharing this. I would imagine it is getting popular now due to a sudden increase in the number of people needing to do digital lessons.
FWIW, I had never seen your video nor heard of a lightboard prior to this HN post, so I would say viral is pretty on point.
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a "mirror my video" setting. https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2020/04/how-to-reverse-mir...
Agreed that the setting exists; disagree about what it does. What that option toggles what you see when you look at yourself. The audience always sees the unmirrored video. This is not clearly explained in the documentation. However, it is mentioned here https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/204065759-Zoom-Roo... for example, where they say of the option "Note: You can tap the Enable video mirroring option if you…
Yeah, I agree with you, this feature always does the same thing in everything (every video conferencing app uses it to show you yourself). The reason is that you're used to seeing yourself in the mirror, and your image would look weird to you if it weren't mirrored.
It would also look weird to everyone else if it were, so they see your normal image.
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#39What she did is really cool - the article though sucks. I want to know how she did this. But apart from the video talking about "a few LEDs" there isn't much to go on.
Put a piece of Plexiglas between you and the camera, put a LED strip on the edges of the Plexiglas, and mirror the outgoing video stream so writing looks the right way (unfortunately your face won't), done!
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#40What she did is really cool - the article though sucks. I want to know how she did this. But apart from the video talking about "a few LEDs" there isn't much to go on.
[deleted]