This is great. I can see myself building this for work - quicker and more satisfying than buying an over-priced set-up.
USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
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Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#72OBS 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..
OBS is going to be such a game changer for anyone in education, I feel like it's going to be as big of a leap from over heads to power point
Only until the administrators notice and mandate some terrible buggy, expensive proprietary solution instead.
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leonardo Da Vinci used to write backwards in his notebooks, in order for his ideas and secrets not to be stolen.
As a left handed person, it’s pretty easy for me to write backwards. It feels like something in my brain wants the letters and words to go that way, even though I never practice.
A right handed person can write in reverse with their left hand without much practice, by holding a pen in each hand, pretending to write with their right and mirroring the hand movements. It's even easier if you just "write" with your finger, eg on a foggy mirror, rather than holding a pen. The scripts we use are definitely optimized for right handed writing.
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#74Several of the comments here are of the "that's not so special" variety. Let us remember, she's an Economic major, not an engineer. Let us also remember, she actually built AND shipped.
Economics professor has used open-source tools and DIY skills to solve the problem with very high capital efficiency is how I see it.
Great example for her students.
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
OBS is going to be such a game changer for anyone in education, I feel like it's going to be as big of a leap from over heads to power point
Only until the administrators notice and mandate some terrible buggy, expensive proprietary solution instead.
Have some sympathy for those administrators please. The backhanders on OBS are non-existent!
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#76It's a fantastic ingenious hack for, IMO, a model that needs to die.
There is no reason to reteach the same class every semester . The best minds need to get together and put in N (say 10) semesters worth of effort into creating the highest production value lectures that all can use until the material fundamentally changes. Most of these kinds of lectures have little to no interaction which can come at other times and the need to "do it live" leads to subpar teaching production.
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#77The principle behind why the writing glows (i.e., totally internally reflected light from the LEDs in the plexiglass getting scattered by the ink) is also how some of the earlier multi-touch systems worked (like the one in Jeff Han's 2006 TED talk). So, with the right software, it might be possible to convert one of these DIY lightboards to support input (maybe to change slides or something).
Perhaps use hand tracking[1] to get candidate finger-tip positions, to simplify using the FTIR touch blobs for contact detection and precision position? [1] https://viz.mediapipe.dev/demo/hand_tracking Web demo - run button is top right.
Or just add a few special purpose physical buttons to the side.
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#78It's a fantastic ingenious hack for, IMO, a model that needs to die. There is no reason to reteach the same class every semester . The best minds need to get together and put in N (say 10) semesters worth of effort into creating the highest production value lectures that all can use until the material fundamentally changes. Most of these kinds of lectures have little to no interaction which can come at other times an…
> the need to "do it live" leads to subpar teaching production
That heavily depends on the subject and the students. The goal of teaching is to teach, not to achieve a high production value of a performance in the Hollywood sense.
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#79The “hack” is buried for some reason. She built a light board, which can show the instructor and “whiteboard” lecture in the same video frame. Reversed, so writing is forwards.
Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
#80Do people like lightboards? You have to be careful what you wear, how you stand, how you move etc. so that you don't cover what you have written (see the video by the inexperienced USC professor where she wears a white shirt). As a result, most of the time you can only use a small part of the screen, like here: https://youtu.be/6I48J7Lf4_Y?t=173 Bad for people who are watching your videos on a small screen (phone, ol…
As a consumer, I love lightboards. They are much more engaging than someone drawing in something like xournal.
That said, as a creator, I'm not shelling out thousands of dollars for it. I have my trusty Wacom tablet right here.