Twitching and Teaching: OBS Studio for Online Learning
How can online facilitators engage and connect with students who are used to consuming fast paced, entertaining video content via social media channels such as Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch? Online facilitator Thomas Bierly argues that that there is much we can learn from platforms like these and by improving your online presence you can enhance your livestreams to better engage your students.
This article has been reposted, with permission, from the RMITO Blog.
Too often teachers fall into the trap of teaching the way they were taught. The logic goes; someone taught me this way, and I learned, so I should imitate that to ensure my students learn as well. It sounds like a solid strategy, but in a changing world what worked before is not always going to work again. This is a trap many of us are encountering with online education. Some, thrown online suddenly due to the pandemic, have tried to bring their in-person teaching approaches into an online environment and found out the hard way that much of what happens in person is not immediately transferable. Others have received online education in the past, and simply tried to mimic that. Online education and, in particular, learning management systems have not seen much substantive innovation over the last decade [1]. The online classrooms I teach in today look too much like the online classrooms I attended in 2010. Think about what your online classroom looks like. Now, outside of academia, think about how you receive information. What do those spaces look like? Can you imagine if the nightly news was presented like an online course?
I certainly would not watch an hour of that, let alone 12 weeks’ worth of content. Can we blame students for not attending or engaging with our online lectures and tutorials? Before COVID, many students and most teachers accepted that this is just how live-streaming educational material is done. But that paradigm is changing.
Many of today’s undergraduate students spent most of their high school experience in some form of lockdown. During this time, they found platforms for socially engaging with each other. While many in-person sports and extracurricular events were cancelled, online gaming provided a venue for friends to engage with each other. Platforms like Twitch gave students spaces to find communities and spend time with their peers. Twitch, a subsidiary of Amazon, is an online live streaming service focused on gaming, but also offers creative content and ‘in real life’ streams?[2]. In 2022 they averaged 2.62 million concurrent viewers with over 1.209 trillion minutes watched?[3].
Twitch offers a rich interactive multimedia experience. Software like OBS allows streamers to put on a professional live broadcast comparable to what you see on the nightly news. While Twitch primarily shows streamers playing games and providing instruction on how to overcome difficult mechanics and challenges, they have since branched out into other educational content. Art instruction and cooperative coding have become quite popular on the platform. Indeed, even tertiary computer science classes have been taught on the Twitch platform?[4]. I would not advocate for teaching classes on Twitch, but there is much we can learn from the platform; and importantly, our students have come to expect similar levels of professional live streaming and engagement. Many students have dabbled with running their own Twitch channel and used free open-source software like OBS Studio to put on a professional live stream?[5]. As a result, they know how easy it is to do, and find our dated methods of delivering livestreams lacking.
The goal of this post is to outline a framework for evaluating online educational communities and then to provide some practical tips, gleaned from Twitch, to help you improve your livestreams. We will start by using the framework to critique the current system/approach and then we will discuss how to improve that experience using OBS Studio.
Using the Community of Inquiry Framework to build presence
Much has been written about communities of practice [6] and online collaborative learning [7]. This post will leverage the community of inquiry (CoI) framework. Garrison [8, p. 2] define CoI as, “a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding.” This model suggests three types of presence are required in the online learning environment for effective and collaborative learning to take place:
Social Presence
-- Interactive responses (threaded interactions)
-- Affective responses (emotional value)
-- Cohesive responses (highlighting group bonds)
Teaching Presence
-- Design of instructional material
-- Facilitating discourse with learners
-- Ability to direct instruction
Cognitive Presence
-- A triggering event (framing the problem)
-- Exploration (brainstorming)
-- Integration (summarising)
-- Resolution (taking action)
Social Presence
Social presence is the “learner’s perceived ability to be socially and emotionally connected… within the community” [9, p. 2]. This creates the foundation upon which critical discourse and higher-order learning can occur. Too often students feel isolated by online learning [10]?[11]. Some of this may be self-imposed because students feel uneasy using webcams and microphones [7], or perhaps they are nervous to be the centre of attention [12]. But participants do not need to use their webcam or microphone to engage in social discourse – this is evident by the popular use of Facebook and Twitter. As you can see in the Twitch screenshots, it is typically only the facilitator who has the camera on while participants socially engage through the chat channel. This is the sort of behaviour many students have come to regard as the norm. They perceive the chat to be of a dual-purpose: 1) somewhat of a backchannel to comment on the presentation and 2) a space to ask questions of the facilitator and others. Establishing a social environment built on trust empowers participants to probe questions, express their ideas, emotions, and concerns. Building a strong social presence is what allows students to collaborate and learn. A big part of establishing a social presence is authenticity, and it is such an important characteristic for teachers to have, particularly in a virtual (otherwise inauthentic) space. When teachers turn on their webcams and they have a fake greenscreen background of the beach, what message does that send to students? Does it invite students to be present in their physical space or does it put a bit of a wall up? Does that background of the beach indicate that they want to be here with the students, or that they would rather be sipping Mai Tais under the sun? As professional online facilitators, we should have a space for facilitating online discussions where we feel safe and comfortable sharing our real environment. As academics, most of us have bookshelves full of novels we promise ourselves we will read when we retire. While my apartment was undergoing some renovations, I sat in front of my fridge and posted reminders about assignment deadlines using magnetic letters. I understand the desire to maintain some separation between one’s personal and professional lives, but as professional facilitators, we should have a designated physical space for this virtual work. If we want to establish an authentic social presence based on trust, we need to start by trusting our students to peer into our physical environment.
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Teaching Presence
Teaching presence refers to the development of instructional content, and the effective deployment of it within the learning management system. An important component of teaching presence is facilitation or the ability to motivate students and maintain their participation. Instructors should establish a climate for learning, prompt discussions, tease out areas of agreement and/or disagreement, and reinforce participants’ contributions [13]. To be effective at this, the facilitator needs to be perceived as an expert. Think back to our earlier example of the nightly newscaster. If they pulled up a PowerPoint presentation, would you perceive them as a trusted source of information? How much do their set, lighting, and camera transitions contribute to their professional presence? Television directors rarely hold a camera shot for more than 30 seconds before changing the angle or cutting to a closeup. These visual changes help maintain viewer engagement. Twitch streamers often set up their bedrooms or offices, so they resemble thematic sets, leveraging RGB lighting to make their otherwise bland walls more exciting. They make use of OBS Studio to seamlessly transition between different applications, screen layouts, and even toggle between different cameras. Today’s students are accustomed to consuming highly produced media from Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok. Spending two to five minutes on the same PowerPoint slide with a static webcam is not conducive to holding students’ attention. Even when Twitch streamers use static webcams to record a podcast type stream, they leverage overlays so popups will appear on the boarders of the stream. These popups might be reminders to viewers to click a like button or subscribe to the channel, to celebrate whenever a new person subscribes or a channel milestone is achieved, or to highlight a question or comment from the chat. These subtle animations gamify the video stream and make what would otherwise be a passive viewing experience feel more interactive.
Cognitive Presence
Cognitive presence pertains to “the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse” [9, p. 2]. Cognitive presence is focussed on the process of learning, rather than any specific learning outcome. The goal is to nurture creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, intuition, and insight – skills which are essential for participants’ future careers. This final type of presence is based on Dewey’s [14] concept of practical inquiry and shares many similarities with Kolb’s experiential learning theory [15]. This online learning process is explained in the Practical Inquiry Model [16]. In the first phase, participants experience a triggering event. This is when they recognise there is a problem or challenge that requires further exploration. This naturally progresses into the second phase where participants search for more information and try to develop possible explanations. In phase three, participants begin to integrate the information they have collected and construct their own meanings. Ultimately decisions are made and in the final phase they apply and test their ideas to resolve the problem or overcome the challenge. Applying the Practical Inquiry Model may enable you to design and facilitate more engaging webinars.
Using OBS to enhance your presence
Many of these presences can, of course, be achieved within the Collaborate Ultra environment provided by Canvas. But I have two very big gripes with this system – primarily related to social and teaching presences. First, you must choose between showing your face (and presenting an embodied presence in the livestream) or showing PowerPoint slides. Look what happens as soon as I share a PowerPoint. Students can barely see me in this tiny thumbnail. I am the size of the mute button. They cannot see if I am smiling, displeased, or confused. There is very little visual emotional value being transmitted in my affective responses.?
My second gripe is the lack of interactivity. PowerPoints are great for presenting static information, but they cannot easily be changed to recognise and reward student contributions to the discussions. The text chat channel, and my voice, are essentially the only means of interaction. Twitch does a particularly great job of including many visual interactive elements: from pop-ups to counters and more.
By using OBS Studio, I can bring a similar Twitch experience to the tertiary webinar. I can do this by creating a virtual webcam that allows me to project not just my webcam, but also my PowerPoint slides through the traditional webcam feed. I can also create a virtual microphone to play background music and sound effects through too. Watch this short video for a brief demonstration of how OBS Studio can be used to enhance the virtual classroom.
Leveraging new technology like OBS Studio can greatly enhance your pedagogy. It is my hope that with a little more knowledge of how to control your virtual environment you can improve your presence and better develop your own community of inquiry. There is a lot more you can do through OBS Studio. I would encourage you to experiment and see what works for you! I would love to see how you set up your livestreams in the comments below. If you find this interesting and want to learn more, let me know and perhaps we can organise a livestreaming masterclass.
References
[1] S. Lin, "Innovation (or Lack Thereof) in the LMS Industry," SkillJar, 6 September 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.skilljar.com/blog/innovation-or-lack-thereof-in-the-lms-industry/. [Accessed 6 September 2017].
[2] Twitch, 19 11 2011. [Online]. Available: https://www.twitch.tv/.
[3] TwitchTracker, 19 11 2022. [Online]. Available: https://twitchtracker.com/statistics.
[4] J. Pirker, A. Steinmaurer and A. Karakas, "Beyond Gaming: The Potential of Twitch for Online Learning and Teaching," in Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE '21), New York, NY, 2021.
[5] OBS, 19 11 2022. [Online]. Available: https://obsproject.com/.
[6] E. Wenger-Trayner and B. Wenger-Trayner, 2015. [Online]. Available: https://www.wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/.
[7] E. Szeto and A. Y. Cheng, "Towards a framework of interactions in a blended synchronous learning environment: What effects are there on students' social presence experience?," Interactive Learning Environments, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 487-503, 2016.
[8] D. R. Garrison, E-learning in the 21st century: A framework for research and practice, New York, NY: Taylor & Francis, 2011.
[9] J. C. Richardson, J. B. Arbaugh, M. Cleveland-Innes, P. Ice, K. P. Swan and D. R. Garrison, "Using the community of inquiry framework to inform effective instructional design," in The Next Generation of Distance Education, Boston, MA, Springer, 2012, pp. 97-125.
[10] W. D. Chyr, P. D. Shen, Y. C. Chiang, J. B. Lin and C. W. Tsai, "Exploring the effects of online academic help-seeking and flipped learning on improving students' learning," Journal of Educational Technology & Society, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 11-23, 2017.
[11] C. A. Lightner and C. A. Lightner-Laws, "A blended model: Simultaneously teaching a quantitative course traditionally, online, and remotely," Interactive Learning Environments, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 224-238, 2016.
[12] M. Bower, "Design and implementation factors in blended synchronous learning environments: Outcomes from a cross-case analysis," Computers & Education, vol. 86, pp. 1-17, 2015.
[13] T. Anderson, R. Liam, D. R. Garrison and W. Archer, "Assessing teaching presence in a computer conferencing context," Journal of Asynchronous Learning Network, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 1-17, 2001.
[14] J. Dewey, Dewey on education, New York, NY: Teacher College, Columbia University, 1959.
[15] D. A. Kolb, Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984.
[16] D. R. Garrison, T. Anderson and W. Archer, "Critical thinking, cognitive presence, and computer conferencing in distance education," American Journal of Distance Education, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 7-23, 2001.