Live streaming university lectures on Youtube

Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay 

When I do my university courses, I usually reserve the last five minutes of the final lecture for course evaluation. I have found that the most valuable method is to keep it simple. I ask the class to write down on a small anonymous paper note one (1) thing that was good about the course, and one (1) thing that they wish I do next year. This is a powerful method, because when you are forced to give just one answer, you tend to choose the one at the top of your mind. The most important. On one of the notes I read “I wish that you would record the lectures, so we can go back and repeat them”. When I read those words, it felt like a bolt of lightning had struck my head. Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that? I am doing the lectures anyway, so why not add a camera and a lapel microphone and start recording them? If you are reading this post, old student who wrote that note, I salute you. That little note back in 2017, planted the seed of a powerful idea and you have helped hundreds of people by now with their studies in acoustics, and the number is growing. I cannot thank you enough.

At first, I only shared my recorded lectures with my students. It was a safe way to get comfortable with the technology (broadcasting software, sound recording, classroom camera etc). In 2018 I decided to livestream the lectures to Youtube and open them up to the public domain. That gave the students a choice to attend in real time from a different location. I still simply gave my lectures “business as usual” in the classroom in front of an audience, with the only difference that I had a classroom camera and a lapel microphone. That is a good tip by the way, if you want a recording to feel authentic. Just forget about the equipment and do your thing as if it where not there. It’s actually much easier to do that in front of an audience. Fast forward to 2020, and classroom lectures are suddenly a thing of the past. To get the authentic feeling when talking into a webcam is a different story. The human interaction is gone, and it feels kind of strange. That’s where my vlogging has helped me out a lot.

I started vlogging in November 2019 and have published at least one short video every day since then. It’s in the vicinity of 400 videos by now. Vlogging is a fantastic way to get comfortable talking into a camera without an audience and make it feel authentic. I usually keep my vlogs short, 60 seconds max. That helps me to get straight to the point. And a live streamed university lecture is basically just a two-hour long vlog. Another way of getting practice, that I have started experimenting with is to live stream computer gaming. Talk about combining work and fun! Both of these practices will provide you with ample experience of broadcasting and recording. I realize now, that if I ever end up in a situation where I am about to recruit a teacher, I will screen the applicants CVs for vlogging and live streaming. I believe they are an important component of future education.

This spring I did my first course 100% online. It went fine, but I really missed the human interaction in the classroom. I never saw the faces of my students except for the odd Zoom call, where most of them never used a camera anyway. This is a big drawback! So, here is a little trick I have introduced for my current course. I start the lecture with a Zoom call with the class, and I go through all the students one by one and ask them how they are doing. This gives us valuable interaction before we start the live stream. It feels great, a big improvement, like a pep talk before an important event. The sweet spot for a lecture seems to be about two hours, but the introductory Zoom call eats away some of this time. However, another benefit I have discovered with live streaming, is that I don’t have to care about finishing the lecture on time as I must do with a classroom lecture. I often go into overtime when live streaming, but it doesn’t matter! The students can watch it on-demand and no-one can stay focused for two hours straight anyway.

Next week we will do some distance laboratory work, which is a completely different story… My gut feeling tells me that we will find a way!