Distance education in front of an audience
Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay
During the Covid years of 2020 and 2021 I went all in on distance education and experimented wildly with live-streaming and recording of lectures. But this spring I am back in the classroom again, and it has been very interesting to apply the lessons learned and the content created. In 2021 I held a few lectures in Building Physics on the topic of moisture, which I also recorded. It was the first time I lectured on the topic and my full focus was simply to keep my nose above the water line and get through the lectures without making to big a fool of myself. The students were very clear in their feedback and most wished for more calculation examples and less lectures. Consequently, this year, I thought about how to approach this and decided to replace all the scheduled lectures with calculation sessions instead. I am now extremely curious to see what the students´ judgment will be.
I had four lessons booked and four recorded lectures from 2021. I simply told my students to watch lecture 1 before the first classroom session, watch lecture 2 before the second and so on and so forth. And then of course, I caught a cold and our whole family became sick. But the timing was excellent, now we just had to make a switch to Zoom instead and do the calculation sessions online. Honestly, I prefer to do calculation sessions on Zoom, because that solves most of the technical issues with document cameras, whiteboards and matrix calculations that are very cumbersome to do the old-fashioned way with a calculator. For example, to calculate the temperature and moisture properties of a composite wall is a task that is well-suited for MS Excel. I do most of my calculations in Excel and have adapted my workstation around it with three displays and a fourth one that is an arm mounted drawing tablet. It allows for seamless integration of multiple cameras into Zoom, and everything can be recorded using OBS studio with top notch HD audio and video quality.
Now, only the fourth and final session remains this Wednesday. But for this final session, I will try something completely new. I will attempt to do the YouTube studio thing with a completely portable equipment in a classroom in front of the students and simultaneously record everything. I have bought a small portable Wacom drawing tablet that is also an extra HDMI display. My plan is to mirror the Wacom and the video cannon so that everything that I see on the Wacom, is what the students will see in the classroom, and it is also what will be sent to the livestream. The regular laptop screen will only be visible to me, the presenter. I have learned from all my lecturing that one computer screen is not enough. I need at least two. And I also need a drawing tablet because a digital whiteboard is a crucial tool for distance education. It adds something that cannot be substituted.
This idea has been brewing in my head since back in 2019. My laptop is a tablet style computer with a Stylus pen. I planned to use it as a digital whiteboard, but after some initial experiments I have given up on that idea. It is not appropriate to use your (single) primary display for recording of lectures and to mirror everything to the classroom on the video cannon. There is both a secrecy aspect and a focus aspect. You shouldn’t show anything on the livestream/video cannon that is irrelevant to the learning activity. So, the two options I considered was to buy a second portable screen to use as the presenter’s view and the laptop as a drawing tablet. But that approach leads to a second problem: The keyboard is attached to the laptop and will be completely in the way when you try to draw something. Which means I would probably have to buy a travel keyboard as well. A Wacom drawing tablet that doubles as a 13” extra display now seems like the obvious choice. “But what about an iPad with the Apple pencil?” some might ask. I have tried that too and did not like it. First, it is in a completely different price class. And second, the integration with Windows is not seamless. I bought the Wacom for 200 EUR and all you need to do is to plug in a cable.
Oh well, this was just a technical rant on my thoughts on how to realize a portable YouTube studio. The day after tomorrow, we will know whether it works. It is a bit funny that what I am attempting to do here literally, is to do distance education in front of the audience in the classroom. But there also lies tremendous potential in creating a method that integrates distance and classroom education into one. And I think it is first and foremost a technology problem. And those, I love to figure out and solve.