Feedback on software to improve remote learning

[arahman4710]

Hi Fora Community,

I am working on a product to improve online lectures and would love some feedback from you. I am primarily focused on treating collaboration + interaction as a first class principle since I believe that is the biggest thing missing from online learning (specifically student to teacher engagement)

Some features of my product:

1) Lectures will have automatic table of contents with timestamps.

1) Students can indicate real time to your professor while they are lecturing that they are going to fast or that you are confused. Teachers can in real time see how many / what % of students think the lecture is going too fast and react accordingly.

2) Students can comment real time on your professor's lecture notes and ask questions on a specific piece. This will allow asynchronous communication when optimal. 

3) Students can set their status to be "open to collaboration" so that other students can see they are open to work with that and begin working with a classmate of theirs.

4) Lectures are easily rewindable and can be play at different speeds so that a student losing a connection for a bit is not a big deal because they can just quickly see what they missed

5) Professors/Students can easily annotate their lectures notes instead of copying data over every time.

These are just a couple of my ideas but wanted to get your thoughts on whether this product may be useful to you / whether it would be useful for your students. If not, please tell me why not and what I can do to build a product that will be useful for you.

I would also love to know what the biggest problems you face with online teaching now and wish to work together to build a better online learning experience for both students and teachers.

Thank you, I really appreciate it.

[polly_mer]

I'm approving this post because I think the discussion will be enlightening all around.

<sets out lawn chairs and popcorn>

[marshwiggle]

Hi Fora Community,

I am working on a product to improve online lectures and would love some feedback from you. I am primarily focused on treating collaboration + interaction as a first class principle since I believe that is the biggest thing missing from online learning (specifically student to teacher engagement)

I think creating another separate product is not a great idea; incorporating useful features into existing LMS's makes way more sense. The more discrete tools one has to use, the more chainsaws one is attempting to juggle.

[spork]

Regarding (1) and (4): why bother with live lectures at all? They can be, are, and should be professionally recorded and edited, often with additional content inserted. See Crash Course World History on YouTube or any Coursera course.

[arahman4710]

Regarding (1) and (4): why bother with live lectures at all? They can be, are, and should be professionally recorded and edited, often with additional content inserted. See Crash Course World History on YouTube or any Coursera course.

Yes, Professionally recorded and edited lectures are much better, but i'm not sure it is always possible and also it is not really possible to be able to interact with a pre-recorded video.

My product idea is mainly to handle the collaboration piece to live lectures that is missing in the current landscape so that students are more engaged with the lecture

[arahman4710]

Hi Fora Community,

I am working on a product to improve online lectures and would love some feedback from you. I am primarily focused on treating collaboration + interaction as a first class principle since I believe that is the biggest thing missing from online learning (specifically student to teacher engagement)

I think creating another separate product is not a great idea; incorporating useful features into existing LMS's makes way more sense. The more discrete tools one has to use, the more chainsaws one is attempting to juggle.

Yes, I do agree that integrating with existing LMS is definitely useful and something I am looking into. For example, integrating with blackboard to automatically add attendance data from the data from the live lecture.

[spork]

Regarding (1) and (4): why bother with live lectures at all? They can be, are, and should be professionally recorded and edited, often with additional content inserted. See Crash Course World History on YouTube or any Coursera course.

Yes, Professionally recorded and edited lectures are much better, but i'm not sure it is always possible and also it is not really possible to be able to interact with a pre-recorded video.

My product idea is mainly to handle the collaboration piece to live lectures that is missing in the current landscape so that students are more engaged with the lecture

In the current landscape there shouldn't be lecture, as it has been traditionally defined.

[doc700]

I didn't do traditional lecturing once we transitioned online but I did lead a problem section in Zoom last semester.  Many of these features are already in Zoom.

You can already click "go faster" or "slow down" on Zoom, use the chat to discuss live, give polls and see your classmates.  My TAs managed the chat during the discussion as I couldn't present material and pay attention to the chat at the same time.  In Zoom I could share my screen and annotate slides I had already prepared.  Critical to my class were the breakout rooms so students could work there together on a problem and then reconvene in the main room. It was decently stable with varying internet quality.  There are small things I would like Zoom to improve but I actually thought it did all the stuff I actually needed.

Zoom was already in Canvas which is what we use.  Also my whole university adopted it -- I personally wouldn't adopt a platform that was not being adopted by the university as I would want IT support if needed, the students to know how to use it and someone in the university to vet the privacy issues.  I know there were some complaints with Zoom regarding privacy but they weren't my problem since the university had chosen the platform.

The pause and rewind sounds very cool but personally I wouldn't adopt a new platform unless my whole campus was going that way.  We already have a contract with Zoom and have trained everyone this summer on how to use it so I don't think we will be going a different direction for the upcoming year.

[Hegemony]

Yeah, lectures are pretty pointless, as well as inevitably tedious. There's a reason TV programs and movies, and even news broadcasts, are never just a talking head yammering on. Even TED talks are only ten minutes long, have plenty of pictures and the picturesque presenter walking around the stage, and people listen to them speeded-up because they can't stand ten minutes of someone talking at them. Lectures are a leftover from face-to-face classes, not an adequate technology for online classes. Almost anything lectured about can be learned better from text, with the exception of subjects like math, where they can be learned better by a video of someone actually writing out the problems. If you try to watch one of the videos of a real classroom lecture, which abound on YouTube, it is a fight to stay awake for even the first three minutes.  Ditch the idea of lectures. Only beginners and amateurs try making lectures.