A couple of months into the shitshow someone in my company sent round a 'finding' that videoconferencing is more stressful than in person conferencing, partly because when you videoconference you are immobile in front of a wall of faces, staring at you. We then mostly stopped turning our our cameras for internal meetings (we mostly still do turn them on for external ones).
Of course, being immobile in front of a wall of faces might be exactly what normal teaching is like, and hence sympathy is limited. Don't know, not a teacher.
I think my son is required to have his camera on during classes when he's at home. I know I'm not allowed to flush the toilet when he's in class and I'm not allowed to pee in the yard during daylight hours. It's an issue.
2: So you guys pulled him back out? IIRC you had sent him in to school earlier in the semester?
They shut down the school before Thanksgiving, not at all taking into account how much coffee I drink in the morning.
It opens back up next week, they say.
During my department meeting, I usually keep it on, but I wear a headset, so sometimes I turn it off and walk away to get a cup of coffee.
In terms of the intrusion into people's houses, is everybody able to set up a background?
I would encourage faces but not require them and try to use the chat to keep people engaged.
Zoom backgrounds only work with relatively powerful/newer computers, apparently, so that becomes an issue of equity.
Huh. At my university it was made very clear to us at the beginning of the term that we are not allowed to require students to have their cameras on (not that I planned to anyway). It sounded like there was some legal reason for this, but I wasn't paying close attention.
My webcam at my work station faces the prettiest part of the house so I generally just leave the backgrounds off, but the times I have turned one on I have used a photo out the window of my previous job so it looks like there's an enormous turkey vulture just behind me.
Can't you just put a carcass outside the window to get a real one?
9 last. I would expect nothing less.
In Jammies' classes, the remote students are not actually there about 95% of the time.
That is incredible and incredibly depressing. How does he stand it?
I dislike Skype, Webex, Zoom, and all the other similar apps. In most of my work-related calls (and school is work, right?), no one turns on video. The screen is used for presentations, not peering into your co-workers' lives. Using the mute/unmute seems to be a skill that has to be learned and re-learned every time some folks get on a call. On social calls, everyone turns on the video, but these are voluntary, fun calls (mostly). People wander in and out of their camera's range, and usually are smart enough to mute if they aren't talking.
My idea of hell is a perpetual Zoom call, though.
12: When it was full-remote, it was incredibly depressing. Now that some students are back in person, he can focus on the them.
The Texas TEA maybe just passed a rule that all students who are failing at least one class must attend in person, starting in January? That's also problematic, and also they're a truly heinous organization and not trustworthy. But getting some of these students back in person will be unequivocally good.
I'm pretty horrified by the disaster of k-12 remote learning, at least the way it was implemented most places. (In large part because of the lack of federal money.)
12: zoom works a lot better for me than a conference call. I
My boss and I and one other person from a different department on ZOOM will morph in to my boss and In her office on zoom with the 3rd person.
I also prefer zoom to a conference call. Even just having black squares with the person's name is very helpful to figure out who is talking and what's going on. I think the chat function is a good thing, too. Plus screen sharing for showing visual aids.
My bosses (who are across the Atlantic Ocean) have always encouraged me to keep the camera on, even pre-pandemic, and I have come to regard that as a good choice. Now, I encourage my staff to keep the camera on. Nobody is required to, though.
In meetings of people on my level, we have one persistent, principled holdout who will only participate via voice. In big staff meetings and individual conversations with my group, people are gradually getting comfortable turning their cameras on.
The Kids Nowadays are going to need to learn to be on camera, but I think if I were a teacher, I wouldn't require it. In the meetings where I am teacher-like (talking to 20 people and soliciting input one at a time) I think the important thing is that *I* be visible.
7: I ain't a computer person, and I know we have computer people here, but that's surprising to me. Putting a still picture on a screen seems like one of the easiest tasks a computer is asked to perform -- orders of magnitude easier than transmitting video, no?
I think they prefer to be called "Androids".
17: The still image part is easy. It's figuring out where the still image goes that's hard, since it isn't supposed to cover the speaker. It does that by looking for motion, but it isn't perfect. This is why in more traditional applications green screens are used, but only pros have one as part of their home setup.
I helped out with some mixed teaching yesterday - some students in the classroom and the rest (and the teacher) remote. Far from ideal - but we didn't enforce cameras-on, and I don't think it would have helped engagement much. Unless you're supposed to watch every little face all the time for signs of boredom, and that isn't easy to do.
Myy F2F class wound up being about 90% remote. I didn't mind if they had their cameras off, but I do try to put them in break out rooms or give them Google Doc assignments periodically so that they work together/come to expect that even with cameras off they're supposed to be responsive.
17: it's not a question of putting a static image somewhere, it's a question of mixing down the video coming in from the camera with a equal number of frames of the static background. I can tell when my boss is using a background of our building because our Dell laptops are too enterprisey to have a proper GPU and the compositing breaks down at the boundary between the background and his hair.
Yes, you can tell when people are using a background because of the pixels and because it's unlikely they really have a replica of the bridge of the Enterprise at home.
We're not allowed to require students to have their video on. At the beginning of the semester my honors calculus class of 20 students usually had around 6 with cameras on, which was great. I mean you can only see 6 faces on the screen at a time anyway. As the semster went on it dwindled down to 2, then 1, and finally 0. And it's just the worst. Having students again did so much for my mood, and now I'm back to being depressed again.
I've also been doing group worksheets, there I "encouraged" but didn't require cameras to be on. For the first month or so I found it worked almost as well as in-person groups. But participation has just totally plummeted. They won't do anything other than split up the problems and work alone and no one has cameras on, and it's all terrible and I hate it.
It's grimly amusing to me that when I was an undergraduate ~30 years ago economists generally recognized that access to the internet was the kind of good that the government should provide to everyone free of charge. In my early adulthood fiber optic cables were laid at substantial government expense. Today Comcast has decided to charge people for exceeding an arbitrary data cap that uses more bandwidth to implement than the cap could ever save. How incredibly incompetent is our society at looking after our collective needs. How unbelievably bad this is for all of us, even those currently cashing in.
If you take an economic maximization view, sure. But if you take a teleological view, comcast was created to be shitty so it improves utility by virtue of being shitty.
I'm thinking of switching to Fios anyway.
My team has started using cameras for our daily standup meeting, and it has become more of the norm in our other meetings, too. We've managed to stick to it, most of the time. I am one of the people more likely to turn the camera off for a few minutes, for family reasons,* but generally, it's working.
We've always done our standup meetings online/remotely, as our company is split across two offices and we used to have a few remote workers, too. So the only change has been to start using cameras more routinely, as we aren't spending time in the same physical space anymore.
* my wife seems to have decided that the exact slot for my standup is when she has to have a shower.**
** it's not really mysterious, she goes for a run every morning after dropping xelA at school (if she's doing the school run) and the timing of the run brings her home at that time.
I'd use Zoom backgrounds myself if it wasn't for the fact that I generally wear a headset, and the headset messes with the algorithm, and the boundaries of my head look a bit odd. It'd probably work fine if I had a green screen, I suppose.
I found that asking for profile pictures of something (them, their cat, their favorite book, a flower, whatever) helped a lot. And a lot of my first-year students have said that they find it easier to talk and present if no one can see them. But I needed to to a lot of structured community building to get to the point where that worked well. (And if they're all chatting on slack behind the scenes, they don't need body language to decide whose turn it is to speak.)
So, my dear partner (need to figure a pseud for him...) is taking classes online. He works for a college and is taking full advantage of the free learning. I have watched a few classes with him. All of the students keep their cameras off, but they make prolific (and often frivolous...) use of the chat. The class is really quite terrible, which has convinced me that attendance should not be mandatory--if you want students to attend, provide value with your teaching.
I don't envy anyone trying to provide instruction in this brave new world. I do know that the night when the TA taught a class was a night and day change in quality. One feature I really like was his integration of live polls into presentation. E.g., here is a hypothetical, is the correct result a, b, c, or d? It was a nice way to make the class a little more interactive.
As for Zoom backgrounds, my favorite is a photo I took at the DDR Museum in Berlin of an East German prison cell. Second favorite is a rooftop bar in Berlin. Which one I choose likely reflects how I feel about the meeting....
On the question of backgrounds, this must be a dumb question, but why would it need to be housed on the individual computer? I mean, if there was a capability to block out everything but something perceived by software as a head, why can't it happen at the browser level instead of the download level? Then it wouldn't matter whether or not the computer or device was new or old.
I suppose it could just be unavailable over the browser, in that case.
That sounds like it would take a great deal more bandwidth.
Here in DC kindergarteners are required to have their camera on in virtual classes. I'm surprised all these other districts are so equitable. Either that or DC's infrastructure is so good that they can assume a higher level of access. Maybe I shouldn't say "required" to have cameras on without checking documents from the beginning of the year, I can only speak from experience about five classes of two schools and I wouldn't be surprised if some family out there had a special arrangement, but "strongly expected"? I know that if our kid or anyone in her class has their camera off, the teacher asks them to turn it on.
15: Sorry, to me "conference call" has been largely absorbed by Webex, Zoom, and such. I hate Zoom but certainly prefer it to an old-school conference call.
28: What's this "switch" you're talking about? Where I live it's Comcast or a modem. Check your Fios privilege!
37: We used to do a. Lot of stuff on Web Ex but during Covid they have tried to standardize a bit, so it's zoom and Teams. I'm not high enough up to have my own zoom link, so I have to use teams which is garbage. But webex was pretty meh.
My FiOS privilege is probably a bit limited because my phone line runs through an underground stream that also waters my basement.
When I lived in New Jersey I switched from cable to FiOS when it became available and it was so much better. I wish it were available here.
My office never uses video chat and I'm glad. Lots of phone conference calls hosted on Skype and other platforms and some screen sharing, but I'd have to go out of my way to find out what my two closest co-workers look like.
I've been encouraging the switch-over from conference calls to zoom with mostly good results. So much communication is non-verbal. I have the privilege of not having to give a shit what people think of my appearance (particularly unimpressive right now, since I haven't shaved my chin for a while, and yet don't have thick enough growth for it to be something.)
I live in a dense urban neighborhood of mostly single family houses on a tree-covered lot with only a few graduate students nearby.
It has worked reasonably well for me to encourage/cajole/beg my (masters-level) students to keep their cameras on, for the sake of creating community and helping me gauge where people are confused. I don't get them all to do that, but about 1/3 do, which is enough to avoid the Ted talk problem. I don't think it solves the problem that the ones with their cameras off are mostly not paying attention, though.
One student set up a video loop the other day to make it look like he was present when he wasn't. Worse, he had somehow edited a doppleganger of himself into the video with him. That was pretty distracting.
I think encourage, but don't require, is the way to go. Maybe spell out some guidelines, so people feel empowered to turn their camera off when they need to: like, feel free to turn if off if you're eating, or if you're in a place with a bunch of people walking around, but if you feel comfortable, please leave it on, so it's not so fucking dreary for all of us.
I bought a green screen, and am so glad that I did.
I don't require my students to turn on their cameras, but I do strongly encourage (hector?) them to do so if possible, and make a point of praising any animals or tiny humans who show up in the frame.
I think encourage, but don't require, is the way to go.
Maybe with adults, but there's no way you're going to get consistent engagement from middle schoolers that way. You have to be able to see them and keep them on task.
I don't want to say I wish for the demise of higher education as a viable professional job, because I don't. But if what happened is that higher education went the way of journalism, and there was something like substack where people like us here could take classes from educators like Ms. Robot -- well, that wouldn't be such a hellscape for us anyway.
consistent engagement from middle schoolers
Has that ever happened?
there was something like substack where people like us here could take classes from educators like Ms. Robot -- well, that wouldn't be such a hellscape for us anyway.
This has also occurred to me - if I am a reasonably good remote teacher, it makes it much more doable to patch together an adjunct schedule for schools nationwide. And then it's a fine line to become freelance - why shouldn't I tell universities that my fantastic cal 1 class will be offered at 10:30 MWF, and I am accepting students from many universities, and at the end of my class, they'll take some nationally standardized exam that validates my value added?
Let me be clear that I loathe hustling and have no desire to market myself in any way shape or form. But if, say, Heebie U went under and I didn't want to move, it's probably easier to patch something together than it used to be.
There's an AP exam that is nearly universally accepted for that, right?
The principle issues istm are credit for the students, and allocation of funds between teacher and institution. The substack-like model would be a complete decoupling of the latter: you get the money, Yale gets nothing, and the Yale student gets credit for a course you taught.
I mean it's already the case that for motivated high school students with stron gmath skills AoPS is better for math classes than what 95% of high schools offer. So this kind of thing is definitely doable, it just doesn't work for unmotivated students. And unmotivated students is almost all of them.
What we're currently offering looks like it works okay, but that's mostly because everyone can cheat on everything.
There's a big problem with AP Tests, which is that the scale is too compressed. The low end of a 5 on an AP Exam is like a B or maybe even B- at a state flagship. (And that's without getting into the calculator issues.) But of course it's in ETS's interest to have inflated pass rates. A real national exam made by universities rather than by ETS would be a big improvement.
I honestly would prefer a standardized calculus exam, if it were better done than the AP exam. I think it would be nice to have a less adversarial gatekeeper role with the students, and would also lessen the pressure from administrations to drastically lower standards to increase pass rates.
Has that ever happened?
My wife's very good at making it happen, but it requires keeping a tight reign on them.
When I want cameras on I tell students that it's mandatory unless they email me with a reason why they can't. And I will accept any reason but they have to give me one. I have one student with a poor bandwidth connection who connects by sound only but the rest will turn cameras on.
That's just for a smaller "lab" class. In the lectures I let them choose, and was looking at all black squares by the end of the semester.
it would be nice to have a less adversarial gatekeeper role with the students
I daydreamed, as a grad student/TA, about slicing education up quite differently; disciplines like guilds, with three jobs: set and grade tests around the world; peer review research; and grant PhDs (admission to the guild). Universities as places-to-live-and-study are run basically by their students, who handle the money and food and hire teachers (who may or may not be guild members , the exams are always set by a guild). And research is paid for by pretty much the mix of philanthropy, foresightful greed and whackadoodleness that pays for it now.
I ought to think of a plot I can hang on this just to write a terrible novel and get it out of my system. I think I was just perpetually taken aback and offended by the conflicting or hidden incentives in the system as tis, including the recruiting/gatekeeping thing done to undergrads.
Will there be parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and football for the alumni? Got to make sure the real issue are addressed.
I hate meetings of every sort but have of course been zooming a lot with a rather incompetent outfit for whom I am doing a little work. I futzed about with backgrounds (a giant cat about to eat me; Four Seasons Total Landscaping; various illuminated MSS, of which my favourite has a couple of rabbits carrying humans over their shoulders at the end of a successful hunt). Then I discovered something called xpres\sion camera, which lets you do slow, crappy, live deepfakes on a mac. Essentially it's an inverted virtual background. So now I can appear as a rather pixellated Mother Teresa. The people who find this amusing really do find it amusing. I just feel it expresses my inner sanctity.
I made a video of myself entering and leaving the room from different sides and walking across the room behind my chair so when I use that it looks like I'm constantly interrupting my own meetings.
Everyone will assume you live on a torus.
I also request that my students add actual photographs of themselves as profile pictures, so that even when many do have their cameras off I still feel like I'm talking to actual people rather than blank squares.
Some of your students are going to be pre-law. They can't help it.
65; yes. The blank squares say so very obviously that this is someone who is paying no attention at all.
So, on a call with somebody using a background of a ski slope. Looks like he's laying on a pillow.