The long wait is over and the fiber optic internet connection at home is finally up and running.
We had a 5G mobile internet since summer one year ago. It was constantly dropping outgoing packets though the speed was OK. due to dropping packets it was practically impossible to teach live over Zoom. My voice and video had more issues than not. Strangely, using my phone to connect worked much better, but then the phone operator was different from the home 5G operator…
I’ll have to extend the WiFi to the side building, where I work, with a mesh. The long time plan is to extend the networks there with Ethernet when I plan how to route the cable.
Remote teaching challenges the way I have given feedback to students. Sometimes the things to comment are largish software design models with associated documentation. When teaching face to face, it is easy to explain, point with fingers, talk together. But in isolation, that is not possible. Commenting their work in writing takes a long time and leaves room for misinterpretations.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I decided to experiment giving audio comments instead of written ones. I look at their documents and UML models, and record my comments into an audio file. The file is then shared from cloud to the student group. For me this is faster than writing. Students are able to follow my thoughts since I take care to pinpoint what I see when I record the audio. Video conferencing could be an option but requires everyone to be there at the same time. Comments on recorded video? – does not provide enough added value, in my opinion. Furthermore, I am able to comment thoroughly (face to face teaching is usually in classroom hours, which are limited) which may benefit the quality of the work. Negative side is that students must tolerate my an hour or so long ramblings about their work in the worst case… I have now given feedback to 16 student deliveries, perhaps around 12-13 hours of comments.
Anyways, as this seems to work, I may continue giving audio feedback after the corona virus isolation ends. Whenever that may happen…
Not a real student feedback recording. I already deleted those from my machine.
Due to the corona virus pandemic, I’ve been working remotely since the end of February. I felt like having a cold and isolated myself before the University officially recommended that to the personnell. Not having the virus though, but a common cold only. Obviously I cannot be 100% sure since there are no tests available here unless you are critical workforce or seriously ill. So keeping myself isolated just in case, at home.
Luckily the grocery nearby delivers food and their app and website to create the orders works quite well. Today the second delivery is arriving, which should be enough for a week at least. They have a very high load of orders flooding the service. What I usually do is to create an order with a couple of products, select the delivery date about one week later, and then keep filling the order until the day before the delivery. By this day, I already have the next delivery date reserved, with a new growing list of items to order. In this way, we am able to secure the deliveries so that there will not be too long gaps in between.
Since the isolation started, I have continued to offer video sessions via MS Teams and Moodle discussion and chat support to the students in the Software architectures course. Fortunately, the course lectures and exercises were mostly over by the isolation started. Students continue working on their exercise work projects until the end of May. Luckily I have a fast network at home, and even better hardware than at the campus. That large iMac screen has proven to be quite a good a thing to have. Currently I am recoding audio feedback for the first phase of the exercise work projects to the students. The amount of feedback to give could be quite extensive, and text feedback is inferior to audio, in my opinion. Video in this case is not needed since I can easily pinpoint the things I comment by addressing the chapter titles and paragraph and page numbers. Let’s see how this works.
The study program and the research unit are using Zoom video sessions to keep in touch and organize during the pandemic. Probably this will last until summer, but I suspect there will be limitations and exceptional situation even in the Fall semester. Time will tell. University support staff has increased the online training of teachers, providing courses in Zoom on using Moodle, Teams and Zoom itself in teaching.
I’ve started to implement a small app with Swift to learn something new. The app is also something to use as a demonstration in Fall in the Data structures and algorithms course. I will take charge of that course after the summer break, so wanted to do something related to the topic.
Below is a demo video of the app in the early phases. I am planning to implement maybe a couple of more sorting algorithms and improve the graphics and usability of the app. YouTube is full of these kind of videos, so I will not put too much effort on this, like implementing tens of different algos.
