eds.activemath.org

Nice experience, today, we made the first day of the online tutorial. This means… fully remote introduction into authoring ActiveMath content.

Challenges… oh thousands… and some really turned out well.

After much shopping and attempts, I ended up embrassing the quicktime streaming approach. I did try to go down different routes (e.g. VLC, TTT (both incomplete either in terms of network flexibility or video capabilities), WebEX or Acrobat Connect (both two expensive) but the resulting choice was much nicer than I thought:

• the book of tasks and detailed installation instructions somewhat in good shape
• personal support with remote connections before the training session (chat, phone, VNC, copilot before to ensure that most tasks are doable

So we started with a (small) set of machines that I had somewhat visited (about 2 hours each) and people were able to start doing things. And that trainees knew sufficiently. This was much more feeling home than coming down to our place, an important facet when you need to learn a lot and keep fighting with the computer .

I presented my slides with explanations and demoed a large amount of things repeating steps when asked. Using the streaming server and the Wirecast compositing application could show both the screen and my face explaining, all with voice, compressed and streamed through the network. Folks in Germany could see the 1.5Mbit/s streams, others the smaller ones (down until 100kb/s). I need to dig more to obtain good quality with small bandwidth, the poor ones in the southern hemisphere really were receiving a stream that had a too small resolution!

The Wirecast application really did a great job into switching between the different video sources, for example, I could show softly how you start or restart ActiveMath in Windows and Macs, this could be exploited considerably more (titling, several people…).

We went through almost the whole programme… not bad! And now sutdents are motivated to actually finish it all. Biggest remark: I need to make more material available for them to browse through while they learn. URLs to the task being explained is fundamental, for example. The chat may be enough for this as long as there’s no big fat downloads involved.

Feedback and questions from the students could have been audio rather than chat only, indeed. We’ll use Skype for all next-time anyways (since even ed’s chat got broken for some reasons) and I we should see students screen. This, actually, could look very nice if it could enter the compositing facilities of Wirecast. This would be easily doable if we may still use by the big PowerMac G5 that the nice folks at the University Media Center lent us.