Big change comes one step at a time
Image by AkshayaPatra Foundation from Pixabay
A significant part of my teaching consists of lectures. They often take on the character of a monologue and are therefore the perfect place to start transforming your education to the cloud. Back in 2017 when I was just starting out with online education however, I still felt overwhelmed. There were so many new factors to consider. I wanted to record my lectures with great visual video quality with multiple cameras, crystal clear audio and a screen capture of my slides and preferably live stream it. I have always been interested in technology and find great pleasure in figuring out how things work. But to realize full blown video production in real-time while you are simultaneously giving your lecture was indeed overwhelming. Three years later and that is precisely what I’m doing.
Here are just some of the questions that I struggled with: What microphone should I use? Should it be wireless? How do I record the content of my computer screen? What if I want to write an example on the whiteboard? What if someone asks a question? Which cameras should I buy? How many of them? How do I connect them? How do I switch between different cameras? As you see, the rabbit hole of technology goes very deep. It is easy to trip and fall into it, especially if you are an engineer like me, and love technology. But a teacher’s job is not to produce video. Your priority in the classroom is teaching. Let us consider teaching as an iterative process of Form vs Content. All these technology questions go into the form bin. You probably already have a solid form: Classroom lectures. This is a tried and tested method and you feel safe doing it, because you probably have lots of experience doing it. Transforming education to the cloud involves a modification, perhaps a significant one, of the form of your education. That is why I believe it is important to keep the other factor – Content – constant when you start experimenting.
I had been teaching part-time for about ten years when I began my process of education digitization. In these years, I had developed a solid package of lectures and I had given them so many times that I could engage the “auto-pilot” and still create learning in the classroom while I shifted my focus to technology. I felt safe with my content and could therefore allow myself to start modifying my form. The pivoting moment for me was when I realized that I had to swallow my pride as a quality focused engineer and produce something that is done rather than perfect. So, what is the lowest hanging fruit here? What is the simplest way of getting your lecture online? I decided that that the minimum requirement was to record a screen capture of my slides with audio narration (no cameras). That way, the student can repeat the lectures in their own pace as many times as they want. The key is to take an activity you already do and digitize a part of it.
The second year I added a video camera to my setup and embedded a picture of myself in the corner of the recorded video. After feedback from my students that they wanted to see more of my body language, I shifted the disposition of my video to split screen 50/50 divided between slides and a camera of myself. It seems like that is the optimal setup. The third year I began to publish all my lectures in the public domain, live streamed. One step at a time, I increased the difficulty level and now I feel comfortable as an E-teacher and therefore I have now stopped experimenting with the form and gone back to polishing my content. That is how an iterative process works. Don’t do it all at once! Change one parameter while keeping the others constant. Evaluate and iterate. Another key takeaway is that whatever you do – Stay away from video editing! That is advanced level. I have chosen to live stream, because when my lecture is finished, the recording is already in the cloud and requires zero action from my part. We should simplify our work, not complicate it. If you are thinking about recording and editing your videos, you might be looking at a >10X increase in the required time. And by then, you will have passed the point of diminishing returns long ago…