Tools

Offering the 'Live' Experience

There are many different ways (and tools available) - when considering offering the live (remote teaching) experience. Your challenge will be:

  1. Herding the students remotely - developing good practice around the microphone, webcams, concentration and participation

  2. Recording sessions - as bandwidth, personal availability, laptop availability (especially in multi-student households) may be at a premium

  3. Not boring them - avoiding Death by PowerPoint - making the sessions interactive and interesting and encouraging them to do something practical/interactive/considered while in a remote situation

  4. Keep the sessions as short and sweet as you can manage - however, we are also aware that some of you have to reflect established timetables.

  5. Find tools to pre-record (hint: some screencasting tools, adobe spark etc - all fit the free criteria) - this way you can prep content and then share asynchronously. The OU ASC has a Facebook Live resource playlists you may steal (yes steal them) as well as content within their community site.

Webex Meetings from Cisco

Cisco are offering Free Webex Meetings for groups up to 100 concurrent participants. Please create your account via https://www.webex.com/webexremoteedu.html. The site contains useful resources for different user types, like highlighted below.

Teachers: Teaching virtually

Virtual class lesson plan

Prepare students for a remote class

Facilitate group projects virtually

Top ways to reach students at home

Students: Join a class wherever you are

Join class from home

Tips and tricks

Facilitate group projects virtually

Parents: Maintain your child's education

FAQ for parents

Virtual parent teacher conference


Other Live Streaming tools

Other tools are available - consider them. All are similar, each has their pros and cons and some work better (for individuals) than others. At the OU Cisco ASC, they use Facebook Live for many of our remote teaching sessions - based on its multi-platform interoperability, cost [free], recording functionality, ability to curate into playlists and availability. It is worth noting that Facebook Live is fairly 'seamless' and designed to be usable by the average user. We opted for the power user approach and integrated Open Broadcaster Studio with this tool. This is also free (easy to google) and we worked out how to take the stream key from FB and inject into OBS in under 10 mins.