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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)

#91

Post by failwhaleshark »

indigochill wrote: post #68
jedimastert wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let us also remember, she actually built AND shipped. It's funny how much further this is than the side projects of so many here (myself included) For me this is one of those 10,000 things. We can either dismiss it, or share in the joy of learning something new and sharing our own lessons. Teachers learning OBS will be as much of a game changer as teachers moving from overheads to powerpoint, I think. Also, I feel…

>Even if it is nothing new, let's be the resource Talking with non-engineers (particularly friends of mine who work in non-profits), I see incomprehensible amounts of potential value in just increasing the uptake of "not-so-special" tech among people who consider themselves "non-technical". That's the point of technology, after all: not being fancy unto itself, but actually doing stuff that people need, whether that'…

There's too many office people who have no interest / refuse to learn any new skills. Many can't cook to save their lives. I doubt 0.1% of them can solder, 0.03% could troubleshoot something electrical, and I'm doubtful of their ability to handle and finish drywall.

It's very sad when people think everything else is beyond their reach or they don't even look to see what could be there.

Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)

#93

Post by animal531 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #76

It'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…

I highly agree with you. I remember back in my university days (now long ago). We'd be in chemistry class trying to copy from the professor's writing on the board, and he went so fast that he'd be erasing while you were still writing.

Spending that time on trying to actually understand (from the student's point) and on explaining more/better instead of writing (from the teacher's point) would have been immensely more useful.

Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)

#94

Post by marcind »

If I may be so bold and share a relevant plug... As teachers (and parents of children affected by various versions of remote education last year), our team came up with https://sharetheboard.com

The idea is simple: our app identifies and digitizes handwritten content in real time, ignoring any obstacles in the way (like people). The result: $0 light board that you can use anywhere (e.g., with a piece of paper).

Digital annotations by viewers are coming in July, so it's as close to shared remote whiteboarding as you can get. And again, no new/dedicated hardware needed: not fancy cameras, not LED strips, not even whiteboards; just a laptop (and soon, a smartphone).

Looks like there are a lot of folks on this thread looking to solve similar problems. Would love some feedback; thanks in advance.

Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)

#95

Post by animal531 »

boulos wrote: post #3
gnicholas wrote: post #2

Huh 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.

Yeah, she uses OBS to flip the recording (she mentions “in software” in the video in the tweet, and the interview mentions OBS)

For a minute I was wondering how did she teach herself to write so well in reverse (and so fast), until I realised that it's trivial to flip the output.

Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)

#96

Post by maeil »

garmaine wrote: post #89
mcguire wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in about 1988, I took a required history class from a local community college. (To help make up for the fact that it took me four semesters to get through the two semester calculus course.) The course consisted of... 1. A high-production-value TV program transmitted on the local PBS channel. 2. In-person mid-term and final tests. 3. "Teaching assistants" (it was a local community college; I'm not sure what their…

> On the other hand, there was no engagement with the material. You read the textbook, watched the TV, and went in to take the tests. End of story. For an introverted autodidact like me, that’s all I want. But I recognize I truly am in the minority here.

Don't think intro/extroversion plays much of a role here, I'm probably an extroverted autodidact and that's still my ideal model for learning. What I enjoy doing in my free time is completely separate from that. Sure, in an ideal world I'd have in-person lectures that are as high production value as the recorded lecture(/TV) in question, but 99.9% of the time I won't be getting those.

Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)

#97

Post by radu_floricica »

mcguire wrote: post #84
maerF0x0 wrote: post #76

It'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…

Back in about 1988, I took a required history class from a local community college. (To help make up for the fact that it took me four semesters to get through the two semester calculus course.) The course consisted of... 1. A high-production-value TV program transmitted on the local PBS channel. 2. In-person mid-term and final tests. 3. "Teaching assistants" (it was a local community college; I'm not sure what their…

Video _should_ take over from lectures, but there needs to be a model to properly replace it. On my part, I think it's an utter waste of the teacher's time to keep repeating the same lecture over and over, when he/she should be doing exactly the conversation and engagement part. It's just we don't have a good, universal model for this. I'm sure lots of places tried and succeeded, but for some reason no particular way of skinning this cat got out to become well known.

Partly, I suspect, is because 80% of the value of education is signaling, so any "revolution in teaching" would be just optimizing the 20% left.

Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)

#98

Post by bbvnvlt »

tsumnia wrote: post #35
ianbooker wrote: post #12

OBS 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.

Yes! Educational research supports being casual and conversational. Although for drawing diagrams, a physical overhead with the instructor's hand visible seems to work far better than Khan style video.

See: Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Effects of observing the instructor draw diagrams on learning from multimedia messages. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(4), 528.

https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000065

Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)

#99

Post by bbvnvlt »

ianbooker wrote: post #12

OBS 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..

Gaze guidance actually appears to be pretty important [1].

For drawing diagrams, a physical overhead with the instructor's hand visible seems to work far better than digital drawing [2].

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103713 [2]: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000065

Re: USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)

#100

Post by mcguire »

radu_floricica wrote: post #97
mcguire wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in about 1988, I took a required history class from a local community college. (To help make up for the fact that it took me four semesters to get through the two semester calculus course.) The course consisted of... 1. A high-production-value TV program transmitted on the local PBS channel. 2. In-person mid-term and final tests. 3. "Teaching assistants" (it was a local community college; I'm not sure what their…

Video _should_ take over from lectures, but there needs to be a model to properly replace it. On my part, I think it's an utter waste of the teacher's time to keep repeating the same lecture over and over, when he/she should be doing exactly the conversation and engagement part. It's just we don't have a good, universal model for this. I'm sure lots of places tried and succeeded, but for some reason no particular way…

"Partly, I suspect, is because 80% of the value of education is signaling, so any "revolution in teaching" would be just optimizing the 20% left."

I disagree rather strongly.

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