videoconferencing – Kent Matsueda

Recording Lectures using Zoom

When teaching online, blended, flipped classes, or preparing for class cancelations, recording your lectures can be an extremely useful technique.

I recommend using Zoom since Penn State has a license for all faculty, staff, and students. If you have any technical questions, you can contact the Helpdesk for assistance.

Here is a list of steps and related best practices:
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Quiet space
1. Do not disturb signs
2. Let others know that you’ll be recording
3. Turn off notifications and silence your devices
Prepare
1. Plug in and test your headset or microphone
2. Download the Zoom desktop client
3. Adjust your Preferences
  1. Cloud Recording preferences overview
  2. Adjust recording preferences
    1. Check “Optimize the recording for 3rd party video editor” option
    2. Check “Audio transcript” option
4. Record
  1. Consider chunking your presentations down into natural sub-topics
  2. Switch to Presentation-mode if you are sharing your slides
  3. For first recordings or when recording in a new space, record only a minute or so and check that recording to make sure everything looks good before recording your entire video
5. Share
  1. Zoom will send you email notification(s) when your cloud recording is done processing
  2. Access your recordings
  3. Copy the Share link and distribute it to your students

Please contact the Office of Learning Design or check out the online web resources with questions.

ART H 111: Ancient to Medieval Art

Ask Angela:The instructor is Heather McCune-Bruhn (hcm1).Do you mean ART H 111 “Ancient to Medieval Art”? YesThe schedule mentions 60+6 seats open, is the course really that large? No. The “60” refers to a resident instruction course. This course is…

Ask Angela:

The instructor is Heather McCune-Bruhn (hcm1).
Do you mean ART H 111 “Ancient to Medieval Art”? Yes
The schedule mentions 60+6 seats open, is the course really that large? No. The “60” refers to a resident instruction course. This course is open to a max of 24 students: 12 from CE@UP and 12 from Lewistown. Angela has “6” listed because she doesn’t want the UP-side to fill up entirely.
Has she taught for CE@UP before? Is she an adjunct or a faculty at one of our Academic Partners? Heather has not taught for CE@UP before, but has teaching experience with teaching courses at Arts & Architecture. She has an MA and PhD in Art History.
Could you get us a copy of Heather’s syllabus and/or detailed course outline? As of 3/3 the instructor was still working on her syllabus.
Is she all set with her materials and content? What is the development state of the course? I’m asking because the situation that she has a course designed for F2F delivery ready-to-go, is a different situation than if she’s still designing the syllabus or activities. She may have good contacts and resources from her connections to A&A, but I will verify. Hopefully she doesn’t have to re-create the wheel.
Would she need assistance digitizing content for use in her course?
You mentioned “2nd six week session,” does that mean this course is a blended learning, accelerated, videoconference delivered course? The course runs TR 6-9:30 PM, 7/1-8/10 in 119 OB. The instructor is concerned about 3.5 hour long lectures.
I’ll be a little facetious… is she a “game show host?” What I mean by that is, is she comfortable in front of a camera, is she able to work well “live,” and is she able to engage a remote audience? Angela says she’s comfortable in-front of a camera. Angela will be training her in the new 119 when the remodel is finished in May. Alice has been notified and will apparently assist with the orientation. There is also John here at UP and others at Lewistown that provide operational support evenings and on the weekend 🙂
Will Heather be expected to run the equipment on her own? See above… no she won’t.
If the course is blended, does that mean her course is using ANGEL as well?
What is her familiarity with ANGEL (if she is using it)?
Would she be relying on any other technology to deliver her course? Angela doesn’t know, she doesn’t think so.
Do you know if she’s worked with an instructional designer before?

Updated 3/11/10

Heather is already using welcome letters to orient students to the course and set expectations
the textbook has 12 chapters that will be covered in 12 class meetings; she averages 6 lectures/chapter
Student-generated presentations of museums and other venues -> based on online resources
she uses essay exams and papers w/ bonus points available
Google Earth to map locations of art pieces
“unknown slide” activity – apply skills on new content in an open forum, builds confidence and exercises higher order skills

More ooVoo Testing

Just did connection tests on the wireless out here and everything looks good. We were getting 8.07 Mbps Down and 2.33 Mbps Up on the Guest network and 6.15 Mbps Down and 6.13 Mbps Up on the Penn State network…

Our AV signal paused a few times on the PSU connection when we were moving around. It was probably due to moving from one wireless connection to another. The Guest network dropped once during testing on the first floor in the PSPB side of the building.

We believe it’s the instructor’s computer since he was experiencing problems with Skype as well.

Just2It: Adobe Connect Pro Lesson Finished!

It’s been a long time coming. I’ve finally finished porting and updating the Connect Pro Lesson in the Outreach faculty development OL 3000: Just2It course. And the work comes just in time since we have our kick off session tomorrow. This will be the second running of OL 3000. This time around, I am not only teaching the section on Connect Pro, but also the lesson on iGoogle. I still have to review that content before the participants reach that lesson.

ooVoo Testing

Linas, Molly and I tested out ooVoo tonight from our respective homes. I was connected via my wireless router hooked up to Comcast cable internet. The ABA program is using ooVoo for the Virtual Practicum course. It is a videoconferencing solution that features the following with a paid account: 6-way video chatting (paid desktop client to 5 un-paid web-based clients). The nice thing about using the paid account to generate a URL for non-members to use has definite advantages of ease-of-use and no client software installation. The browsers require Java and I’m sure there are minimum system requirements, but I doubt they’ll be a problem for the participating students.

When we first logged on, Linas sent Molly and I a URL to call his standard (unpaid) account. We fooled around with the settings and eventually had four computers connected (I had two on my side). The quality was awful to put it bluntly. Linas only had two bars on the video quality scale. We couldn’t figure it out since we both did network speed tests and found we had more than enough bandwidth.

In a last-ditch effort, I opened my desktop client using one of Ed Donovan’s paid accounts (psumi15) and generated a URL to share with Linas. The difference was night and day. We were able to chat normally and declared the test a success! I was even able to share my desktop with them, but the frame rates were pretty low (1-4 fps). I wasn’t able to send any files or text chat with them, but that’s not suprising given that they were connected via their web browsers. Twice, the video from my second laptop dropped out, but it only lasted for a second or two.

So, I think Dr. David Lee’s course should go well (knock on wood) as long as he has a paid account and no more than five students to chat with at one time.

Here’s a snapshot of the three of us chatting away: