USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)
news.usc.edu
news.usc.edu
Let us remember, she's an Economic major, not an engineer. Let us also remember, she actually built AND shipped.
It's funny how much further this is than the side projects of so many here (myself included)
For me this is one of those 10,000 things. We can either dismiss it, or share in the joy of learning something new and sharing our own lessons. Teachers learning OBS will be as much of a game changer as teachers moving from overheads to powerpoint, I think.
Also, I feel like this is super indicative of the gate-keeping mentality a lot of IT and tech people have around "not-cutting-edge" technology. Even if it is nothing new, let's be the resource
Talking with non-engineers (particularly friends of mine who work in non-profits), I see incomprehensible amounts of potential value in just increasing the uptake of "not-so-special" tech among people who consider themselves "non-technical". That's the point of technology, after all: not being fancy unto itself, but actually doing stuff that people need, whether that's wheels enabling long-distance transportation or lightboards enabling better long-distance education.
I'm reminded of this brief but profound interaction in the pilot episode of "Halt and Catch Fire": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQLbi4VXYcA
It's very sad when people think everything else is beyond their reach or they don't even look to see what could be there.
Just an anecdote but as a chemistry student I remembered lessons taught from an overhead far better than those from powerpoint. There was a stark contrast between the lower division organic chemistry series whose instructors used overheads, and the upper division organic chemistry mechanisms class whose teacher used slides. Those slides were mostly bullets and diagrams, sometimes with crude animations which were meant to indicate nucleophilic attack or whatever. Just watching the lecturer draw diagrams and arrows and listening to them talk was far more helpful, for me.
The lightbox seems much more overhead like in presentation. I dig it, and I hope today's college students learn well from it.
A physical overhead with the instructor's hand visible has been shown to work far better than presenting ready-made diagrams. It also works better than digital drawing, probably due to the natural inclusion of pointing gestures guiding students' attention [1].
There is also evidence (and good theoretical reasons to believe) that a transparent lightboard leads to unnecessary distraction/split attention. [2]
That lumps people together. I'm in IT/tech but don't value intricate, difficult, extreme novelty over everything else. That would be absurd.
Remember Stanfords $1 paper microscope for looking at blood samples? Now that was badass.
The cleverness is in the saving of $7940 to solve a problem. Dumpster-diving for parts and materials, or even freeganning Whole Foods are all perfectly valid too.
I remember a guy used his seat aisle's window on StartupBus as a whiteboard with dry-erase markers, but I guess he should've brought an LED light strip to make it pop more. The trick is installing it. ;-)
Great example for her students.
https://www.utoday.nl/news/69384/ut-professor-makes-glow-in-...
After a LOT of debugging, I'm convinced it was due to Zoom bandwidth throttling, which I was unable to get waived.
The "Khan Academy"-style drawing I think really helps keep learning online casual and conversational in a way just presenting slides doesn't.
See: Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Effects of observing the instructor draw diagrams on learning from multimedia messages. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(4), 528.
For drawing diagrams, a physical overhead with the instructor's hand visible seems to work far better than digital drawing [2].
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103713 [2]: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000065
There is no reason to reteach the same class every semester . The best minds need to get together and put in N (say 10) semesters worth of effort into creating the highest production value lectures that all can use until the material fundamentally changes. Most of these kinds of lectures have little to no interaction which can come at other times and the need to "do it live" leads to subpar teaching production.
That heavily depends on the subject and the students. The goal of teaching is to teach, not to achieve a high production value of a performance in the Hollywood sense.
1. A high-production-value TV program transmitted on the local PBS channel.
2. In-person mid-term and final tests.
3. "Teaching assistants" (it was a local community college; I'm not sure what their exact status was) with office hours for questions.
It...worked. I learned the material, such as it was. As such, it was somewhat better than the worst in-person classes I experienced.
On the other hand, there was no engagement with the material. You read the textbook, watched the TV, and went in to take the tests. End of story. There were no asides---having a teacher take part of a class to look at some current event from the viewpoint of the class, having the teacher answer a completely off-the-wall question that leads to a good discussion. There were no discussions, in fact. I'm sure some of the students who knew the material got together to review for the test or something, but honestly, I don't see why. The whole experience was aimed at the lowest common denominator with no way for the teacher to dial it up for some or all students.
It worked, but it was a worse learning experience than many 500 students classes that I had from enthusiastic, engaged teachers.
I suspect that's why the model hasn't caught on, at least at the level of decent schools---people have been saying (and attempting) that video would take over from lectures literally since Edison invented the movie. (I'm sure it's more appropriate for the degree-mills of the world, though.)
For an introverted autodidact like me, that’s all I want. But I recognize I truly am in the minority here.
I’ve had beers with other devs in my field, and very productive cross-industry meetings. But general agenda-less meetups are not useful, no.
Partly, I suspect, is because 80% of the value of education is signaling, so any "revolution in teaching" would be just optimizing the 20% left.
I disagree rather strongly.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/is-education-a-waste-...
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning...
First link is paywalled, and the second is rather unconvincing, and pales in comparison to Caplan's overly careful argumentation.
I suspect we have different lufe experiences as well. For me most education years were either a waste of time, or at least came with very high opportunity costs.
Spending that time on trying to actually understand (from the student's point) and on explaining more/better instead of writing (from the teacher's point) would have been immensely more useful.
What that option toggles what you see when you look at yourself. The audience always sees the unmirrored video.
This is not clearly explained in the documentation. However, it is mentioned here
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/204065759-Zoom-Roo...
for example, where they say of the option "Note: You can tap the Enable video mirroring option if you want a mirror effect for your own video display (where the display of your own Zoom Room looks like a mirror)."
It would also look weird to everyone else if it were, so they see your normal image.
place a piece of paper on a board,turn it 180degree facing away from you,writing on it with the pen pointing towards you.
[1] https://viz.mediapipe.dev/demo/hand_tracking Web demo - run button is top right.
I would like to buy/build one of these for my home office? What's the best guide or best pre-built?
Honestly I'd rather just throw money at someone whose built one for me. But either way is fine.
Also lots of places to buy them. Here's one: https://www.desktoplightboard.com/product/desktop-lightboard...
Instructables is the goto site for this sort of thing, I found these instructions for building a small one for under $100: https://www.instructables.com/DIY-Lightboard/
Building a Low-cost Lightboard for Video Lectures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYwXOLU4TKk
A good enough project on HN tends to get coverage elsewhere, a lot of Tweets etc etc.
I can't stand it, won't click them, but clearly I'm abnormal and it works, most people love it (or have a 'FOMO' on it) and click them.
FWIW, I had never seen your video nor heard of a lightboard prior to this HN post, so I would say viral is pretty on point.
Or you use low lighting and then walk behind the board, like here: https://youtu.be/6I48J7Lf4_Y?t=266 Which is a bit annoying because then you have things (i.e. you) moving in the background all the time. Not good for visually impaired audience members and people with low-bandwidth connections.
I will keep my $50 drawing tablet, although I have to admit that it's much easier with a lightboard to point to things (on the other hand, with a drawing tablet, you can just circle the word that you want to draw the audience's attention to and then undo it when you continue).
That said, as a creator, I'm not shelling out thousands of dollars for it. I have my trusty Wacom tablet right here.
The idea is simple: our app identifies and digitizes handwritten content in real time, ignoring any obstacles in the way (like people). The result: $0 light board that you can use anywhere (e.g., with a piece of paper).
Digital annotations by viewers are coming in July, so it's as close to shared remote whiteboarding as you can get. And again, no new/dedicated hardware needed: not fancy cameras, not LED strips, not even whiteboards; just a laptop (and soon, a smartphone).
Looks like there are a lot of folks on this thread looking to solve similar problems. Would love some feedback; thanks in advance.
I want to know how she did this. But apart from the video talking about "a few LEDs" there isn't much to go on.
The article writer has a a degree in (print) journalism, do they teach this sort of crap in journalism school nowadays?
> Eric Lindberg is the associate editor for features at USC University Communications. He is a USC graduate with a degree in print journalism.
So this isn’t actually any cheaper than what I would think of as the standard solution, which is to buy A drawing tablet (which also conveniently doesn’t take up a ton of space in your living area)
Name brand (Wacom) drawing tablet for $60:
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07S1RR3FR/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_gl...
I think the actual easy solution is an overhead camera and pens and paper. Doesn't look as cool obviously.