Converting to Online in Under 2 Weeks

This past week I've been working to convert my face-to-face Data Science and Analytics Master's program class (DSA 610), which is heavily demonstration/discussion-based and hands-on, to asynchronous and online. I thought I'd share my experiences in case anyone can learn from this or wants to chat.

As an adjunct, I'm part of SUNY Buffalo State's larger effort to keep classes going and to keep every student on target for successful course completion (i.e., actually learning what they're supposed to be learning) and, as applicable, graduation. Classes "resume" on Monday, March 30th.

On the class theory side, my class topic is relational data, and how that moves through an organization from conversations and paper to database design/implementation and then on through exploratory data analysis and dashboard creation/presentation. Technically, we're covering a lot of SQL and a lot of Excel and a lot of how to talk to humans about data. A lot of my work for this transition has been figuring out what can be converted to a video-based lessons, including creating supporting files so students can work along with me as I demonstrate/discuss by myself, what additional assignments I might need to create or reading I might need to assign, and what I still want to discuss with them synchronously and "face-to-face" over Blackboard Collaborate or Zoom, even if it's now as a series of smaller groups instead of the entire class at one time. If I were just teaching some technical skills, this might be a bit easier. Instead, I work to contextualize these skills in real-life business scenarios so that students can more easily see application cases, and class discussion has been pretty dynamic, as many of my students are either working or interning already.

On the technology side, I spent a few intense days of exploration and selection, knowing that I had to just start (re-)making content ASAP. Already having decided that I was moving towards video lectures for the demonstrations and one-sided discussions, I spent my "free" time on these days scripting out, word-for-word, what I was going to say, and making sure my demo files were in place for those scripts. This would also help later with accurate closed captioning.

SUNY Buffalo State uses Blackboard as its LMS, and I've been using it already to communicate with students and disseminate course materials, so it was a natural first place to go for class discussions. While it can be a little...lackluster...in its ability to handle groups for video chat, it does let me easily switch between sharing my screen webinar-style and then letting everyone join back into a discussion where we can all see each other's video feeds. It's the lackluster bit that made me decide to have Zoom at-the-ready as needed, in both its webinar and meeting capacities.

Wanting to stay inside the SUNY Buffalo State ecosystem as much as possible also meant that my natural choice for video hosting is Ensemble Video. On my own, I probably would have hosted directly from my own website or used YouTube.

I also decided to use Camtasia Studio for my video capturing, audio recording, and editing. While sometimes it can be dry, and I'm sure the students will miss seeing my face for three (3) hours every Monday evening, I decided to rely on screen recordings as my main feature. Camtasia would have let me record from my webcam as well, but I wasn't thrilled with the video quality, something that probably could have been sorted with more time to pull this off, a better lighting setup, etc. On a normal day, my favorite video editor is Adobe Premiere, but Camtasia gave me all of the features I needed without needing to use other software.

Ideally, I'd have more time to create the new versions of my class content, and more time to polish, but I've been pretty happy with how quickly I've been able to knock out my first few videos using the tools above.

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