I very much (so far) prefer teaching face-to-face rather than online. I get immediate feedback from all the faces in the room. With that said, there may be some different advantages to teaching online.

Peer Instruction Online

Theresa Wills has been teaching synchronously online for 10 years, and it is her preferred method of teaching. She uses Blackboard Collaborate for breakout groups, and at the same time presents her content using shared Google Slides, using interactive elements on her slides. One example is a multiple choice question, "Which of these is not like the other?"

Class participants all have edit permission, and so are invited to copy/paste the red dot in the middle, and paste it onto the element that doesn't belong. Then she repeats the same slide, only this time participants paste text on the box they think doesn't belong, explaining why not. [Hint: A case can be made for all of them why they don't belong!]

This is just one example of lots of different kinds of interaction. Another is to create a blank slide for each breakout group, for them to use in capturing their work, which can then be used in a gallery walk once the large group is back together. In a large university class of 80+ students we might have to adapt some of these techniques, such as having only one "editor" in each group of students have permission to edit. Theresa reported she once used these techniques successfully with 140 participants.

See a Youtube recording of her online PD, and a link to a version of the Google Slides that she uses for a session such as the one shown in the video. Register for one of her free online PD sessions at http://TinyURL.com/GMUTeachOnlinePD

Besides BlackBoard Collaborate (max 20 breakout groups), Zoom also allows grouping (max 50 breakout groups). WebEx and Google Hangouts (Meet) are other options.

See this list of online Community Building / Ice-Breaker activities.

Software Tools

Recording videos for students to use asynchronously later:

1. Camtasia Studio is made just for this purpose and includes nice tools, with the educational version costing $170 (June 2020).

2. Screencastify is a Google Chrome browser add-in that allows you to record your screen, voice, and video of yourself to make free 5 minute videos, which you can then post to YouTube.

3. ScreenCastOMatic does a similar task, running on multiple browsers.

4. On a Mac you could use iMovie, or PhotoBooth. OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is Windows & Mac free software that probably has more features than you need.

5. A last resort solution is to startup a Zoom session (or Google Meet) and record it, with you being the only person in the session. The drawback to this approach is that you will lose audio and video quality due to compression as you go through the network servers.

Managing live video:

See the OBS installation description page that includes instructions on configuring OBS to use a green screen to give a live "talking head". (See also the UIC faculty editable online teaching software/equipment page at bit.ly/uiconlinetools)

Equipment

Online conference calls (in my opinion) can cause more fatigue than face-to-face conversation because we have to work harder to understand the audio, and we get less visual information than if we were face-to-face. Having the right equipment can help us be heard and seen more clearly. At the very least each participant should use headphones or earbuds of some kind.

1. Pyle Pro mini over-ear boom microphone ($16 on Amazon). Puts a tiny mic in a more ideal location, right in front of your mouth. It is fragile, so be very careful when bending the wire to customize for your ear. The single ear version is a bit unstable, so you may prefer the $14 double-ear holder version. (I recommend you discard the included 1/8" to 1/4" adapter, which is total garbage, and instead buy one like this for $10 if you need it. The cheap ones are plastic and when moved sometimes you lose your audio.) You will also need an audio interface, shown below

Extra

Still reading? You may be interested in adding just your face to your video recordings. If you have a "greenscreen" background (such as this 6'x9' one for $22) then you can record both your "talking head" with a greenscreen background, along with the video of whatever is on your computer screen. You can do this using a tool such as Camtasia studio or iMovie. After you have recorded it, you can choose to have your "talking head" video superimposed on the rest of the screen, selecting the size and position, and you can use those programs to make the greenscreen portion of your video transparent. This will look something like the following:

As mentioned above under Software Tools, OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is free software that gives you everything you need, plus more. If you are trying to use it to give you the "talking head" live, with the background transparent, to use as input to Zoom or some other video-conferencing software, then:

• PC users use obs-virtualcam (though I haven't done the installation with this one to give any insight).

• Mac users:

• 1. Download and install the free NewTek NDI/HX driver and Tools. Of the tool options, the one in particular you need to install is NDI Virtual Input which will allow you to define your OBS output as a virtual webcam, as explained in this video.

  2. Download and install the Palakis obs-ndi software to create an OBS Tools / NDI Output settings menu option.

  3. Launch OBS. From within the newly created Tools / NDI Output settings menu option select Main Output and give it a name (e.g. OBS_NDI_Output).

  4. Launch NDI Virtual Input and select your virtual video input source created in the previous step (e.g. OBS_NDI_Output) using the Sources menu option at the top of the screen.

  5. Within Zoom select NDI Video as the input camera. This will give you your created composite OBS video as your Zoom image.

Tired of looking out your own window? Look out of a different window at http://windowswap.com/

Tools I'm Exploring

Some of the ideas below came from the ai-4-all.org Online Learning Strategies (retrieved 6/15/2020).

1. Google Colab Notebooks (Python in this case) which allow mixing code and rich text together on the same page. These are built on top of Jupyter Notebooks.

2. Hypothes.is gives the ability to annotate any web page. Another similar tool is Perusall, which advertises itself as having AI-based auto-grading https://perusall.com/

3. Flipgrid is a free online video response platform. Students can record video answers to a prompt, watch each other’s videos, and create video answers to each others’ videos. We’d recommend one grid per lesson, with different topics for each discussion topic contained within that lesson.

4. Voicethread allows annotating existing text or video, where the annotations themselves can be text, audio, video, or additional documents.

5. Twine hypertext story-telling tool

6. A Gradescope competitor, Crowdmark allows providing written feedback on student submitted work.