Online training: lessons learned

I just finished teaching our very first online training last week and I wanted to share some of the lessons learned. Maybe they can help someone else or I may get some ideas on how to make it better from you -- I’m actually counting on the feedback to learn ;) 

Study your use-case or and your class

Understanding what you want to do in class is really important. Some questions you should ask yourself are:

• How long will it run? It is not the same to do a webinar for 30 min. Or classes for 40 hours a week.
• What is the dynamic of the class?  Will you just do PowerPoint karaoke or do you want to interact more with the class? What tools will you use to keep their attention?
• Do you need breakout rooms or spaces where students can discuss in smaller groups?
• Should students be able to chat and share information?
• Do you need to be able to take control and help them?
• Do you need multiple cameras, share your screen, maybe mobile phone?
• Security and data privacy. Is it just on paper or do they actually deliver what they promise?
• How many students or viewers are you expecting: 5, 10. 100, 500, 10K?

Select the right platform for you. 

There are many platforms out there that you can use. Try to map your use-cases on to the tools, drive the selection down to two or three, then go ahead and test them. 

Testing is key, on paper they all work but actually putting them under stress is what will help you decide. This will actually be a lot more work that you think, so plan a good chunk of time for this. It may imply a steep learning curve because you probably don’t know how to use all the platforms on your shortlist.

One of the things to check is how much of your CPU the client eats up, for example, Google Meet eats at 1-2 cores on my laptop, so it does not leave me that much to work with.

Location, video, lighting and sound

Like any video production having a clean, quiet and well lit location at your disposal is key. A good source of natural light is a big plus.

Try to get yourself a good mic and lights. There are lots of videos for and by video bloggers on YouTube. 

Since we are talking about video, make sure you have a good camera. Again adjusted to your use case. For example if you will not be streaming at 4K 60fps, get something simpler.

What did I do

My use case was the IoT Security Bootcamp of 2020-05. It was originally planned to be onsite, but due to the COVID-19 situation most students agreed to proceed as an online training.

This is a 3-day online hacking class. I work a lot with virtual machines and external hardware, so the solution had to work with a native client and not kill my CPU. I also share slides and need multiple cameras: one for me and one fixed on the table with a ring lamp to show the hardware.

Even though the office has lots of light on a sunny day, I’m based in Cologne, so half of the year it is dark and raining. For that I got myself two Elgato Key Light Air lamps. They are really flexible and provide enough light for this and other projects. Additionally I got a 8’ ring lamp, where I mounted one of the web cams.

Talking about cameras, I went for two Logitech StreamCams. They take in great light, can be mounted on screen and have a standard ?’ mount that works with almost any tripod.

As an online platform, I decided to use Microsoft Teams. It has a good security track record and I can control all aspects of it. Created an account for each of the students and added them to the class team. To simulate breakout rooms, I created multiple channels which allowed me to troubleshoot the typical issue that arise during the class. Being able to grab control of a students device was important for me, and it is supported for all clients except Linux.

The platform needed to support native clients for all major operating systems (Windows, MacOS and Linux) to keep the load down. BTW on my laptop sharing the screen, the load was around 30% of one core.

Here is a picture of my rig setup in a meeting room in the office.

Additional lessons learned

Preparation is key. I had to ship the hardware used by all students, luckily I talked with Andre and he recommended me to send them at least 2 weeks in advance. He was right, the kits I sent in Germany took around one week, but the ones I sent to The Netherlands arrived the Friday before the class.

Testing all the components before sending them turned out to be more important than before. Normally in class if a part is defective, I can just change it (I always have at least 2 spare kits with me) Here all students were a couple of days away. This time luckily no parts were broken, but two devices were not flash as expected. Half of the Yardstick Ones had an older firmware and the XBee shields were not correctly flashed by the distributor. To flash the XBee shields I had to do it like on the Apollo mission, use only what was in the kit.

Next time I’ll test each part before packing them.  Here is a short video of what goes into the kits and the packing process.

Make sure you use your troubleshooting rooms. Even though I planned them, on the first day we all ended up helping one student. Normally I would go to his desk and help him while the rest of the class works. Which put me behind schedule for the other two days.

Cameras on! This is a really important thing. It always for a direct feedback loop. It makes a big difference when you ask "did everyone understand?" and the response are multiple thumbs up or you see some very lost faces.

At the end of the day..

The class worked very well. We had a great time, students learned a lot and everything worked. Well one of the demos didn’t, but you don’t always have the demo gods on your side when you are doing live hacking ;)

It is definitely something I will continue doing, even when it is always better to have everyone in your classroom.

What has been your experience with online training? Care to share your setup and your rig?