TeacherTech: the software tool chain

the constraints of muscle memory; part 2 of several

Were this a classroom day, I suspect the mood in the room would be….heavy. I would probably take the pulse of the room. (And maybe be thankful to work at a place with Defining Leadership Principles literally carved into the building, at a university with Fiat Lux as its motto.) I’m reminded of what has been a frequent instruction day dilemma for several years now - how much to read the news? How much should I try to anticipate questions, comments or just moods driven by current events, versus how much should I try to compartmentalize, both myself and the class experience? That, too, is part of the role - helping students be fully present as students, whatever may be transpiring in the world outside.

Sometimes the room decides that for you. That was my experience after the 2016 election. I had two undergrad classes that fall. I recall entering one classroom what was likely the Thursday after election day and quickly realizing I couldn’t not acknowledge the room. But, I didn’t want to assume politics, even in Berkeley. What I counseled the room then probably applies today: if you are angry, be constructive in your anger; if you are happy, be constructive in your joy. And then I talked about how I had channeled my own motivation for political involvement when investing in government affairs work during my startup days. We had very valid reasons as a startup to raise our profile in Washington: E911 regulation, spectrum policy and also federal business opportunities. But I also was personally motivated to take that work on. That investment had career-long dividends. And the mission and motivation helped when the work necessitated patience.

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Back to our scheduled programming on #teachertech. Last week I wrote about hardware upgrades driven by the shift to remote instruction. An interesting byproduct of this investment is my standards for a “good” in-person meeting have gotten higher. A good in-person meeting should have serendipity, and co-discovery - elements which can be facilitated remotely, but are a little harder. When this doesn’t happen, it’s frustrating.

When figuring out what to invest in, I had some help. Credit for the DSLR upgrade goes to Roy Bahat of Bloomberg Beta (and fellow Haas lecturer) - Roy guest-spoke at one of my classes in fall 2021, by Zoom, and it was clear he’d invested in a DSLR. Roy’s set-up is here. I ended up going with a Sony ZV-1, not the Nikon EOS, because I wanted full HDMI output, not micro USB. (Do the extra pixels matter? Clearly Roy’s set-up was already noteworthy in having a nice bokeh effect and not causing eye fatigue.)

I drew inspiration from three instructors whom I’ve never met, but feel great gratitude to: Andrew Lo of MIT Sloan; and Brian Stevens and Sean Willems, both at the Haslam School of Business. (Faculty nerds may remember Willems’ appearance in the Hechinger Report in October 2020 - the instructor who built his own studio with lightboard!). The trio co-authored this paper: World of EdCraft: Challenges and Opportunities in Synchronous Online Teaching. (Chronological note: this version is from February 2022. I referred to other publications by the trio during the fall 2020 and spring 2021 time frame, including Andrew Lo’s YouTube videos and trio’s bill of materials.)

Within Haas, the wondrous Terrance O’Dean entered the pandemic with a leg up, as he had already developed MOOCs. Others built home studios - faculty meetings over Zoom became a way to compare home teaching environments. Camera quality and mic quality definitely seemed to improve. (“Chin view” angles seemed to go away.)

In the aggregate, Lo, Stevens and Willems built three different systems that showed what’s possible in online synchronous teaching. I owe them a debt of inspiration. Of note: all three use OBS as their streaming software - not Zoom or Teams. Despite the inspiration, my adoption of OBS (StreamLabs in my case) has been limited to asynchronous use, such as for class introductory videos or “pre-videos” used for flipped instruction modalities, such as the one shown below. OBS enables more flexible asset arrays and aspect ratios then the now-familiar PowerPoint-over-Zoom, which leaves a mini instructor up in the corner.

This is for a few reasons: muscle memory (t0\oo many years in PowerPoint); the need to be able to operate a system solo; the need to build an asset library for OBS; the limitations of my home laptop in spring 2021 (my ThinkPad Yoga didn’t enjoy having Zoom, OBS and PowerPoint open simultaneously, which didn’t seem to bode well for sections of 45 or 80 people); the return to in-person instruction in fall 2021. But some of this is inertia and muscle memory. The perceived switching costs are real. That said, had fall 2021 also been remote, I likely would have done two things over summer 2021: bought a workstation, and invested in getting “good” at Streamlabs. But right now I’m still exploring. The combination of StreamLabs plus Vimeo (with transcription and subtitles) has been useful for asynchronous modalities.

Embedding yourself in Zoom - as shown by Haas faculty (and prolific author) Don Moore here - does enable some playing with the aspect ratio.

More to come on this topic. Like I said, this is part 2 of several.

Onward and upward.