Backstage: Technical

The technical setup is fairly simple and comprises equipment (hardware) and toolset (software). The bare minimum in terms of equipment would be a mobile device connected to the Internet, as we have seen in the case of students participating in class activities while walking or traveling. As main organizer and facilitator of the learning process, the teacher is called to play a role that will in most cases require additional resources, but the equipment required is still quite common .

Fig. 17: Teacher’s equipment used during the online session illustrated in figures 8 and 9. The iPad shows the image of the room where the students were located in the university, in Norway — the thumbnail images (left to right) show the whiteboard shared by the laptop computer in the foreground, two students’ computers, and the teacher webcam image. The laptop computer (a Surface Book 2 with touchscreen flipped) was in Portugal at the time and is sharing a whiteboard that is being displayed on the large screen in Norway. A digital pen is being used to write on the whiteboard.

The iPad shown above serves for communication only and is used to livestream sound and image from the teacher (who is seen in the rightmost iPad thumbnail image in figure 17 ), and the laptop computer is used for screen sharing, including whiteboard and all other applications used in the course. This specific portable computer offers a touch sensitive display that can be flipped — together with a digital pen, this flipped display provides a very similar experience to using the smart boards that are available on-campus, which are shown below.

Fig. 18: Equipment used during on-campus class activities, including a desktop computer on the right and a smart board on the left (the digital pen is lying on the table in between the two screens). Notice also the mobile microphone in front of the keyboard, which enables the teacher to broadcast live from the classroom (this was the type of microphone being used by the student that was broadcasting live in one of my YouTube accounts in figure 11).

The on-campus classroom equipment comes with a standard toolset comprising office applications and Skype for Business, and the toolset needed by a teacher that wants to blend on-campus and online classroom activities is available free of charge — be it from Google, who has provided a collaborative web-based office suite for more than a dozen years, or from other sources such as Microsoft. The toolset that I use in my blended learning model comprises the following main components:

Google Drive for cloud storage
Google Docs for text processing
Google Slides for presentations
Google Hangouts for video conferencing, including screen sharing
Google YouTube for video hosting and distribution, live streaming
Google Calendar for synchronizing all activities, including video conferencing scheduling
Google Forms for student surveys
Google Spreadsheets for grading and collecting survey responses
Google Sites for bringing everything together in a course website (replaced by Canvas in 2017/18)
Google Groups for asynchronous class discussions (replaced by Canvas Discussions)

Most of the Google tools listed above continued in use after migration to Canvas, with the exception of Sites and Groups. Canvas became part of my toolset in 2017/18, and currently provides the main anchor for the teaching and learning framework presented in this document.