1 Chalk and Talk Transition
More info for Queen’s Engineering people is at https://engineering.queensu.ca/faculty-staff/faculty-resources/remote-teaching/index.html
Chalk and Talk has been the default in university teaching for all sorts of good reasons. To leverage the experience of instructors, it is essential that we find good ways to deliver chalk and talk style lectures remotely, and ideally asynchronously. We also need to move efficiently given the volume of courses and limited preparation time. (Video 4:54)
Basic Synchronous Remote Lectures with Technology
Convene a Zoom meeting of all participants. Turn on recording so you can asynchronously share later. Plug in your iPad via cable for speed. Choose the camera app and start recording video. (It is often well worth capturing at 4K resolution so you still have good resolution when you zoom in to the details in post-production.) Point it at a piece of paper to capture your handwritten notes that would have gone on the blackboard. Choose Share Screen / iPhone/iPad via Cable from Zoom to broadcast the images displayed on the iPad screen.
Basic Asynchronous Lectures
Use Camtasia and make your project a full HD video (1080×1920) as it is always easy to downgrade to 720 later if you need to. Combine the Zoom recording and the iPad recording from the synchronous lecture, aligned based on the visible characteristics of the sound track.
Use the better quality iPad Video for the handwritten sections, cropping and zooming as appropriate. Cut it out to show the underlying Zoom recording for other elements like your face or on-screen views. An hour of 4K iPad video could be 20 GB, so you may want to trim it to remove the excess. (Video 13:56)
Better Asynchronous Lectures
Start with the basic Camtasia lecture project and start editing out pauses. First apply Visual Effects / Clip Speed to the whole clip. Then use the cursor and right click to split the audio track about 1 second before the talking starts, and right after the talking ends. Delete the blank sections. Split the video into sections that match the voice and use the clip speed to make them the same length as the voice segment. This speeds up the associated video so your handwriting happens faster. Try a “write then talk” mode when recording the original material. (Video 7:45)
Preparing for REMOTE Delivery
- Make your pencil notes on an 8.5×11 sheet in landscape orientation. It’s shaped more like a video screen and will help you get the layout right when you are writing. One page is about all I can deliver in one short, focussed video. Prop it up off camera so you don’t lose your way.
- Make sure your iPad or Phone, or document cam is viewing the whole area you might write in. You can always zoom in during editing, but equations that wander off camera are gone for good.
- Set up all the materials you want to display as separate virtual screens before you start your presentation. Then you can switch between content without needing to unshare and reshare separate windows.
- Be sure to increase the text size to make it readable. This will take more planning on a large desktop screen than on a laptop.
- Practise by delivering live to at least a small audience and taking questions. You can edit later and it will help you develop the skills to make a good presentation without an audience.
Media Attributions
- Sound Signatures to match timing © Rick Sellens is licensed under a CC BY (Attribution) license