For orientation we have a number of sessions planned over three days. During the first two days the "buddies" (older students in the program) greet the students by video conference. Normally they do a tour of campus (and pubs…), but everything was online this semester. The dean and the professors in the program put together short videos to introduce themselves. The students broke out into groups on the second day using a Jitsi video conference system that we have set up on a local server. It works well with smaller groups.
On Friday the dean held an Ask-me-anything in the morning for all the programs and I had the IMI program students for four hours in the afternoon to discuss where to get information, how to study, introduce the program, and talk about academic integrity.
I used Zoom for this, we had 30+ students out of 40 registered for the program, plus another instructor and the tutor in on the meeting. These students were rather reluctant to speak, but did use the chat window more and more to ask questions during the session.
I have an exercise in the integrity session in which I direct them to the main digital libraries for our field, the ACM and the IEEE digital libraries. They are to choose a paper and then analyze how references are done in-text and in the reference section. The goal is to see that there are many different styles, the important thing is that you reference anything that is not from you.
For this I used the breakout room feature in Zoom. It has to be enabled deep in the advanced meeting settings. I can set up how many rooms I want and have Zoom randomly assign students to the rooms, or I can choose who goes where. I can move people from room to room, and I can "beam" myself into any of the rooms.
I set up 15 rooms, that turned out to be too many for me to comfortably visit in about 10 minutes, so we needed a bit longer for this session. The students can share their screens in the session, for example showing me where they are and I can point them to the place they have to click on, rather like we do in the labs. Some students lost their connections, when they re-joined they were unassigned. I didn't realize until much later that the red dot blinking at me means that there are unassigned students floating around. I can, however, easily put them in any room when I see them.
I sent the exercise prompt to all the rooms right after breakout, and then before gathering them back into the main meeting, I sent another message to warn them what we were doing.
With one click I can have a message sent to them all to finish up and return to the main meeting, and they are automatically brought back after 60 seconds. I then opened up the whiteboard on the screen sharing menu. They put their results into the chat window, and I could copy the results from there and put that on the whiteboard, re-formulating what they wrote as needed, or adding my own notes. I need a bit more practice using it, it's a bit fiddly, but when we were done, I was able to save an image of the board and upload it to Moodle.
We started out with 14 students in Jitsi. The communication was so bad that we quickly dropped it and moved to BigBlueButton. Because of a configuration error there, we could not show video or share screens. So I set up a Zoom room, it took only a minute or two, sent around the room number and password by email, and we reconvined there. The topic was how to do research and how to store bibliographic data. I had all the links prepared in tabs in a new browser window so that I could easily click from one to the next. One student did not have a microphone, so he asked his questions in the chat. During screen share you can select the chat from the "..." in the menu, then the chat window floats over your screen, making it easier to see. We took two breaks instead of one (it is a four-hour class), because it is very tiring.
After introducing them to Citavi/Zotero (some had actually already gotten started!) I gave them 45 minutes to work alone and then post a page with 10 publications relevant to them in a Moodle forum I had prepared. That gave me time to rest, and then we finished up with half an hour of me sharing my Moodle screen and pulling up the PDFs the students had prepared and me commenting on what was good, what was wrong, what they needed to look at again.
This master's elective course was full, 24 students, we have a waiting list. I started this in Zoom because I was not sure if BigBlueButton was now configured correctly. Again, one student didn't have a microphone and used the chat. I was presenting slides for the first 60 minutes (it is a three-hour class) and didn't see the questions in the chat. The other students were very good about repeating the questions from the chat for me.
We then had group work in breakout rooms. Before the break I asked if people wanted to work together and they answered in chat. I could set up the breakout rooms by having Zoom randomly assign people to rooms of three each, then easily moving students to another group or exchanging two students. The students needed to stay in Zoom, just turn off their audio and video. While doing this one student noted that he was dropping the course, it was too much work expected. I was quickly able to re-distribute the students to their rooms. They came back after the break to the main room, I announced the exercise, asked for questions, and sent them to the rooms. I can broadcast to all the rooms, so I sent the URL for the exercise, which I always have online anyway, around again. There is always someone who was not paying attention!
I teleported myself into every room as I did in previous classes, checking that everyone found the materials they needed. 10 minutes before the end of class I sent around a message that I would be closing the rooms in 1-2 minutes so they should please exchange email addresses. Then I clicked on "close rooms", that sends another message to them to please re-join the main room. After 60 seconds they are automatically sent back, I can change this value in the settings. As master's students in computing, they experimented with staying in the room. It works, they automatically re-joined the main meeting.
I briefly spoke about how to submit the reports on the exercise to Moodle, as we have some Master's from other universities who don't know Moodle and don't know that I insist on them writing complete sentences in English for their reports.
This lecture is heavily slide-based, I have 54 slides for 90 minutes with a number of diagrams sourced from our textbook. The resolution of the pictures is bad enough when I am projecting in a room. It is terribly distorted when I export my slides from Keynote to PDF and have Zoom "adjust" the picture size for me. Okay, I'm bitching on a high level here, I was not happy with the images today. I also normally do a lot of hand motions to show coupled systems, layered systems, etc. I tried to do these into the camera. After the lecture many students used the Reactions button to show me clapping hands in the corner of their window, I found that very touching.
The students really wanted me to videotape the lectures, so I tried it out. It is easy enough to turn on, just push the recording button and choose if you want it stored on your computer or "in the cloud". "In the cloud" means someone else's computer, so i chose my computer. 90 minutes of lecture was 144 MB (!) in mp4 format on my disk, an audio-only track was 34 MB. Since I promised, I uploaded the thing to our Mediathek, it took 15 minutes to upload (!) and was still being converted an hour later when I went to bed. The next morning the server had died with all the professors uploading videos... So I think I might either just upload audio and slides, or do nothing. All that extra space just to see me wave my hands is a bit of overkill.
In the exercise session we first tried to use the BigBlueButton video conference system integrated with Moodle. It is irritating that I always have to do an echo test and there is always a page telling me what to do when I enter. However, I was not automatically made moderator, I had to leave, add myself as Moodle teacher to the BBB moderator role, and then return. And do the echo test again, remove the page, and start to share my screen. BBB crashed on me. I started in again, repeated everything, started to share the screen, and crashed again. So I set up a Zoom room in about 60 seconds, went back in, posted the link and had the 21 students move to Zoom.
There I was easily able to share my screen, and then swiftly set up breakout rooms with random assignments of three students per room for the exercise. That went very well, I visited every room to make sure they were started okay. One woman lost her connection and rejoined, Zoom informs me with a little red dot on the breakout room overview window that there is a problem. I could easily put her back into her group. I had said that we would use the Moodle chat room as a back channel so that they could communicate with me, and some did. But it was difficult for me to stare at a chat room with nothing happening, and they didn't think to click on the bell to inform me that they had a question, so it sometimes took a few minutes for me to answer. One group discovered a cool feature in Zoom:
When a student clicks on this button, I get a little pop-up window in front of what I am currently doing:
<student name> needs help in breakout room <n>
and there are two buttons, one to take me right to the room and one to cancel. That is EXACTLY what I need! I just didn't notice the button when I was visiting the student rooms. So make sure to tell the students that this is there!
In the feedback about the session the students are unanimous: Zoom is miles better for teaching that the other systems we have tried out.
One of the aspects we deal with in Software Engineering is how to ethically design systems. As part of my "day job" I write ethical scenarios (in German) in computer science to help people discuss how they would react to such a situation in real life. Normally I put people in groups of 4-5, assign them to a scenario, have them read and discuss the scenario (I provide questions for them to get started), and I have them prepare a poster that each group presents at the end of the session. I normally schedule 10 minutes introduction to the exercise, 50 minutes working on the task (I remind them 15 minutes before the end that they have to get cracking on their posters) and 30 minutes for the presentations (5 minutes per group, but they ALWAYS need more time).
This week (April 14 & 16) I introduced the exercise (the scenarios are all online) and randomly assigned them to breakout rooms in Zoom. It worked *really* smoothly, and when one student changed computers I got a red, blinking light and could direct him back to the room. I visted each room once at the beginning of the session to see that they were all working and to show them where the call button is found. People sometimes don't understand the difference between the icons at the bottom of the Zoom window and the icons on the tray/dock of the operating system. Two people tried it out, it works so well. I get informed with a popup window and can click through to the room. One person was still telling the others that she had clicked the button, and I was already there.
I told them to come up with some idea to present the case and the results, after all, they are Media & Computing students. 30 minutes before the end of class I sent a message as a broadcast to all groups to wrap up, and brought them back 25 minutes before the end (I only had 4 and 5 groups).
They were brought back, and we started the presentation. What a wonderful collection of solutions I got! There was a shared Google Docs file with text, a nicely organized Google spreadsheet, a Google presentation (all three are provided for collaborative work by Google); There was one document prepared by a group with free images to illustrate their topic, one person created it and the others contributed text and links and images via the chat; one group just had one member open up Windows Paint and one person actually drew a poster-like document. Each shared their screens (I have to stop sharing mine for that to work), and one or even two people participated in presenting the work. They are then to submit a writeup of the experience to me by the next exercise for points.
One suggestion: Take a screenshot of who is in which breakout group and put it up on your screen. That makes it easier for you to directly speak to the students, as they don't remember which room they were in. Zoom does not preserve this information.
Breakout rooms are also to be able to be set up in advance, I will play with that sometime soon. The rooms can be renamed.
One other cute feature: The Internet is now full of Zoom backgrounds that students can use to mask their kitchens or bedrooms. I had two students who had already found some very nice ones, the rest were so envious, I am sure they will all have some next week :) This can be turned off, but I kind of like giving them the possibility to use video and not have to keep their rooms clean.