The Informatics Teaching Festival is back for a second consecutive year. 

 Join us for the opportunity to:

• hear interesting presentations around lessons learned in the past year and good practice in online/hybrid teaching from colleagues and inspiring speakers from other schools
• listen to the feedback provided by student representatives regarding their experience with studying in an online/hybrid context
• listen to the feedback provided by teaching support and administrative staff as to their experience with teaching and administration this past year
• learn about new approaches to teaching and educational software
• share your own experience with teaching delivery, student support and course administration during workshops and informal GatherTown meetings
• reflect and come up with ideas together for improving our delivery of online and hybrid teaching, both as a school and in our different courses.

If you’d like to attend any of the following sessions, and are not a member of the School of Informatics, please register your interest here, and a Collaborate link will be emailed to you in advance of the session(s).

Schedule

We are aware that many of you are considering how best to support paired programming online. The Computing Team have been investigating various options here. Some are still being documented, however, please see below one potential use case using Google Remote Desktop.

*Assumes both students are using a Remote DICE desktop.

• One student runs Chrome from within their Remote DICE session (i.e.*not* on their personal device) and goes to the remote service URL.
• They click on the get support button. This gives them a unique one time use ID they must separately exchange with the other student.
• The other student runs Chrome from within their Remote DICE session and goes to the remote service URL. They click on the provide support button and enter the unique ID.
• The first student will then be prompted whether to accept the remote connection.
• After that both students will be able to share and interact within the first students remote DICE session. The best approach to coordinating activity will be to take turns, one student driving the other navigating and then swap over.

Caveats to note:

• Since the students are using Chrome within a Remote DICE session the sharing and control is limited to that session window only as opposed to their entire personal device.
• Both students need to have a Google account. We strongly suggest that students do not use their own personal google account, if they already have one, but create throwaway ones purely for the purpose of these sessions.
• To setup a Google account you need to provide your name and mobile number for verification.
• I don’t believe there is any way to have more than two parties share the session – so won’t work for groups of more than two.
• You will need a fallback in case any students do not want to accept the T&C of a Google account. This does not need to be functionally equivalent, it can be a “lesser” experience.
• A DPIA for use of Google Remote Desktop has now been approved.

1. Open the KalturaCapture App.
2. Check the screen feed, camera feed and audio feeds are on.
3. Hit Record.
4. When you want to finish recording, you can pause or stop the recording.
5. Give the video a title, description and tags (optional) and click upload.
6. When the video is uploaded, a link to the video on media.ed.ac.uk will appear. Click this link to check your video.\
7. On Media Hopper Create, if your video had a screen and camera stream, both will be automatically controllable by the end user allowing for full screen of either of the videos and multiple split screen views.

Below is a list of topics being covered in Teaching Hour events throughout May and early June 2020. Judy Robertson will lead, with the help of learning technologists and invited guests. An email was sent to all teaching staff on 6 May with links to the rooms in Collaborate, where they will be held.

Events will be recorded and the links to the recordings will be uploaded here. Please note: you will need to be logged in to Media Hopper Create (using your University / EASE login) to access the recording.

The following resource list has been put together by Judy Robertson, with help from Kobi Gal and Michael Gallagher. It will continue to be updated and we hope it will be of use to colleagues developing their Semester 1 2020 classes for online delivery.

https://eu01.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/leganto/public/44UOE_INST/lists/25925176760002466?auth=SAML

Mark Zarb, SISCA Director of Education has, with the following colleagues, recorded a webinar on best practices when transitioning quickly to online education: Danai Korre (Edinburgh), Areti Manataki (Edinburgh), Rachel Menzies (Dundee), Judy Robertson (Edinburgh) and Jeremy Singer (Glasgow).

In it, they deal with all manner of topics (suggested by the community), and hope that this will be a good resource in the days to come:
https://youtu.be/r2AGZHCMQ_s

The webinar roughly follows a three-point structure:

1. Migrating to Online Teaching
2. Considerations during the Module
3. Pastoral Care

Let us know what you think – in particular, whether you would like to see more of this style of content emerge from the Education community – or whether you want to be involved in its creation.

Feel free to circulate far and wide.

In my previous post, I listed some EdTech tools and services available to you in the event of disruption to campus-based activities – such as the current COVID-19 epidemic.

I would like to take this opportunity to list a few non-tech things to consider for the same scenario.

Communications

• Think about how you communicate with your students at present. How much do you rely on face-to-face communication? What are you going to use in place of this?
• Related to the above, it’s very easy for your message to be misinterpreted. Be clear, and say more than you think is necessary, to ensure students are clear about what you are asking of them. Check discussion boards regularly to get on top of mistaken beliefs early. Oh, and be friendly!
• If you don’t already have an online discussion board for your class, set one up now. There are various options – please get in touch for further guidance.

Managing online synchronous classes

• Running an online class takes longer than a face-to-face class – both in preparation and in class management. Build this in to your timetable now.
• Related to the above, if you are delivering a lecture / presentation in real-time online, you will need someone to manage the back channel of questions and discussions. Identify a TA or someone suitable who could perform this role now.

Recording lectures for online delivery

• If you have prepared a one hour, or two hour lecture, consider breaking this down before recording. Breaking up your lecture into smaller chunks (eg 20 minutes) will be easier for you (less editing required in post) and more digestible for your students.
• See previous post for the various supported tools available to you for recording lectures / smaller classes.

Further support

• Consider offering online office hours. I shall be running an Informatics Learning Technology service office hour. This will be online, via Blackboard Collaborate and will be every week day 10-11am. You can access here (Chrome or Firefox are the recommended browsers): https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/47b0a9ad52514aa28667b3dfab10b727

This is a reminder of the tools and services available to you in the event of disruption to campus based activities, such as the current COVID-19 epidemic.

If your *students* can’t access campus

• If students can’t come to lectures, they can access the lecture recordings via the Lecture Recordings link in Learn. Please note: this is only for those lectures delivered in a centrally supported room.
• Any room which supports lecture recording, also supports Live Streaming. Please get in touch if you would like to enable live streaming of your lectures.
• For those courses requiring to use submit, students can download and install Virtual DICE or remote access to normal DICE machines via XRDP or SSH. Please log a call with computing help for further information.
• For those courses which don’t require to use submit, remember that Learn has an assignment tool which will more than likely meet your needs. The Informatics Learning Technology Service can help with this – please get in touch.

If *you* can’t access campus

• The same product used for lecture recording at scale across campus (Echo360) has an application users can download from the website. Please note: the application is only available for Mac and PC. If you require a loan device, please get in touch.
• The Echo360 application – called Universal Capture – allows you to capture audio, screen + video. You can then publish direct to your course via the recording interface. This means students will access your recording in the same place as recordings of campus based lectures. See the bottom of the page for links to video and written guidance.
• The Echo360 player (the interface students use to watch lecture recordings) also has a nice feature where they can ask questions at specific points in the presentation. The lecturer can then review these and answer questions in the appropriate context. See Media Hopper Replay: Q&A discussions, flagging confusing content, and bookmarking for further guidance.
• You may want to deliver smaller, tutorial sized classes via Blackboard Collaborate. Collaborate sessions can be scheduled via MyEd or Learn. All sessions run in the browser (Chrome is recommended) and so there’s no need to worry about user devices.

Further Help

In addition to local help via the Informatics Learning Technology service, Blackboard are running sessions on Tuesday 10 March called “Preparing to scale online teaching and learning during Coronavirus”. This webinar is for anyone involved in administering or delivering teaching and learning, including but not limited to system administrators, eLearning technologists, IT managers, Heads of Teaching and Learning, faculty and academic staff. Register here: http://bit.ly/COVID-19EURUG

Media Hopper Replay’s universal capture tool – video instructions

Media Hopper Replay’s Universal Capture tool – Mac

http://www.docs.is.ed.ac.uk/skills/documents/Lecture%20Recording/Guides/3873_v2.pdf

Media Hopper Replay’s Universal Capture tool – Windows

http://www.docs.is.ed.ac.uk/skills/documents/Lecture%20Recording/Guides/3872_v2.pdf

Media Hopper Replay: Q&A Discussions, flagging confusing content and bookmarking

http://www.docs.is.ed.ac.uk/skills/documents/Lecture%20Recording/Guides/3887.pdf

An Instructor’s guide to Media Hopper Replay: Viewing course and student analytics

https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/An+Instructor%27s+guide+to+Media+Hopper+ReplayA+Viewing+course+and+student+analytics/1_rs96etgi