Shifting to a digital teaching model - some geekiness at play

Give a tech enthusiast the chance to run classes using the digital medium alone and see the chaos that reigns.

I am a tech geek (buying items to the extent my poor salary in academia allows for)...and have a collection of electronic items from over the years of my PhD and academic jobs. Due to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic the teaching had to forcibly move to a fully digital mode. Though the classroom infrastructure was upgraded to the needs through smart TV/board, my discomfort of being in a huge classroom which is empty, and using items that are shared (covid-19 scare, remember!), plus the dependency on other people for the logistics, the aircon etc. - basically a chance to hold on to my freedom and creativity! - ruled in the favour of trying to run my classes from my office.

I let loose the geekiness in me with the designing of the idea - what would be the key things needed for a great experience for myself and more importantly for the students. I decided to list down the critical elements:

① Presentations to be shown. Annotate on slides

② Whiteboard during case discussions and adhoc explanations. Multiple boards may be needed. Needs to be visible size for students

③ Good light, visibility to students

④ Audio clear to the students

⑤ Ability to see students, handle chat better

I then mentally looked through my inventory of items which would help meet these elements and drew up a diagram illustrating the draft plan. Here is the final version of the plan as it stands today. Final, in so far that nothing new pops into my head before classes start in October!!

I realized that the lighting in my office with overhead lamps is not very great so I decided to purchase a not very expensive LED ring light, one that could be screwed onto a camera tripod - I remembered my old tripod which was just collecting dust all these years. I had my iPad with Pencil which would be a perfect fit for the annotations as well as a whiteboard replacement. 

I was worried about the audio (microphone) so tried to buy a wired headset with boom mic, but got a cheap chinese version which I promptly discarded in lieu of my existing bluetooth headphones. Dry runs suggested the bluetooth mic worked well enough. 

The initial idea was to run cisco webex (since my college standardized on it) on my office MacBook Air and then use my ipad to connect separately as a participant where the screen would be shared and I could draw on it or annotate presentations. Quickly, in dry runs, I realized that there is a decent video lag on the drawing part. I did some internet search for ideas and was impressed with a hack (jugaad) that allowed for mirroring the iPad screen on the Macbook through Quicktime Player over USB and instead sharing that through the Webex screen share! Dry runs showed that there was less video lag in the drawing now. This seemed more manageable. However the step of jugaad with Quicktime was not very neat. Only recently I realized that Webex has a builtin option to share an ipad’s screen in the macbook if it is connected over USB. Even this was good, without much noticeable lag, and avoided the jugaad part. So this is what I finalized on and decided to keep the jugaad option as a failsafe/fallback option. The ultimate failsafe being the first idea of logging in on the ipad webex as a participant and sharing the screen there.

Here is an interim realization of the design:

Some of the very initial dry runs with some colleagues showed the difficulty in managing the shared presentation and the video of students while interacting. Added complexity of chat on the same screen reduced the screen space and lost chat inputs from the students. List of participants also was something one might need to monitor. The conclusion was that one screen may seem insufficient. However it was not clear whether an additional laptop would solve this problem - the need was to reduce the shared presentation and only be able to see the students’ video and the chat/participant pop-ups. After some time I realized that webex did offer that option for the participants to adjust the view such that the shared screen/presentation was reduced to a small bar so one could see only videos of the others. At this point I decided to pull out my decade+ (13 years actually) old IBM thinkpad (Lenovo) laptop which was completely discarded ever since my kids ruined its keyboard and trackpad - though it had been in great working condition otherwise - actually was running Windows 10 (can you imagine?!!). A H/T to IBM is in order, they designed military grade consumer durables at that time - am not aware if Lenovo has followed that legacy

The old laptop needed some jugaad to get back into shape - unfortunate hiccups on the way were a CMOS chip error at boot, as well as the ruined keyboard/trackpad. An external wired keyboard (since date/time needed entry at boot and a bluetooth keyboard might not work) and external USB mouse plus a running around Udupi exercise (wasted) for the CMOS battery was needed before the laptop was back on track. A few major Windows 10 updates later the laptop was ready to serve. Dry run with Webex showed that it worked well for the purpose of showing the participants (not very hi-res - remember 13 years old screen!!). The setup was ready in my view!

Here is the latest interim realization of the design:

I learnt that there might be an access to external 24” monitor to use for the classes. I plan to connect that to my lenovo laptop and be hopefully able to see larger and better resolution images of the students. Fall back option is just the lenovo screen. The ultimate failsafe would be to rely on the Macbook itself for student videos.

These are the images of work in progress of the studio. Stoked to have pulled out old gear (IT and non IT) for use in this context and come up with this plan. The actual results will be known once I start classes. Hoping for the best - if not anything I did have fun putting all these ideas together and creating something! Maybe I put more effort in my IT passion than in my teaching preparation? ?? - Jury is out.