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Notes for Real-time Virtual Classroom (RTVC), primarily Blackboard Collaborate Dale E. Parson, Department of Computer Science & Information Technology, 1/2015

Page 5 protocols updated June 2015 to incorporate spring 2015 CSC543 lessons. Based on teaching CSC 520 Advanced Object-Oriented Programming in Fall 20141 1. Read the IT documentation for faculty & students before the first class.

http://www2.kutztown.edu/academics/office-of-distance-education/faculty-resources/blackboard-collaborate.htm

2. Here are the simple instructions that I post for students ahead of the first class. http://faculty.kutztown.edu/parson/fall2014/CSC520RTVCFall2014.html

3. Via the course’s D2L page go to Communications -> Online Rooms and set up a room for the duration of the semester and a little beyond, with access for everyone in the course. On this first screen click “Join” to join a session, and click the name of the room to get at the Archive tab. Whenever you record a session, the Archive appears ~15 minutes after you end it. Make sure you are the last to leave a session! See comments about this issue below. The archive is great for a student who needs to miss a class. It lasts at least until semester’s end. I have no use for it after that.

                                                                                                               1  Acknowledgements  and  thanks  go  to  KUIT  for  helping  me  to  get  started  with  Blackboard  Collaborate  and  for  setting  up  the  classroom  instructional  technology.  

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4. Join the session. You may have to update your Firefox browser, your Java Virtual Machine, and click-through install some additional software the first time around. Do this at home for practice, and do it on your lecture machine before the first class. Here is what I see after I join at home when no one else is in the session.

Make sure to change Cable/DSL to LAN when you are in the classroom! You are more likely to get buffered audio delays (high-pitched voice bursts) if you don’t. 5. I usually start recording when I log in. I never click “Don’t remind me again” (see

next page) and I always leave the Collaborate debug console up in the background. Once you start recording, make sure you are the last person to leave the session, at which time you can stop the session. According to KUIT, if you leave while students are still in the session, the recording may not work. I haven’t tested that bug. When I exit it prompts about ending the recording. You can throw students off the session if you need to (if they have stepped away as you are about to end class). Do that before leaving the session.

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6. I enable everyone for audio & chat. The only time I enabled students for video,

whiteboard, application sharing and web tour would be for presentations by remote students. In fact I use application sharing exclusively (with audio & chat), and I share my entire desktop. I have never found a use for video or whiteboard, although web tour may be useful. I don’t use the in-classroom whiteboard. Application sharing streams a video of what appears on your desktop. Application sharing does not stream audio that you play out through your speakers from a recorded audio file – I have not really needed that. Web tour may stream out audio. I have not tried that.

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I usually use the Audio Setup Wizard at the start of class to set my microphone & speaker levels.

You may want to set Audio -> Maximum Simultaneous Talkers to 2 so students can’t talk over each other. I usually don’t bother because they prefer to ask questions by typing them into the Chat. They didn’t use audio except when they gave talks.

7. I use Application Sharing and I share the entire desktop. KUIT recommended sharing applications singly, but I prefer to share the entire desktop and be done with it.

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8. Note that after you run Tools -> Application Sharing -> Share Entire Desktop, you

also need to run View -> Application Sharing for the video of your screen to stream out.

9. Along with the previous point, I do as much as possible with Web Applications,

including drawing and typing. That way I can open everything in one browser window and just use browser tabs to change presentation context. You don’t need to do this, but it avoids fishing around the screen for applications. I use non-browser applications when I need them, or course. There is a way to load PowerPoint slides into Collaborator, but I just use PowerPoint on the desktop when I need it.

10. PROTOCOL 1: A student who wants to ask a question via the Chat should type the question and THEN raise the electronic hand (Raise Hand icon) that rings a bell. If the student rings the bell first, everyone winds up waiting while the student types. The only exception is when I am racing out ahead of the student’s question. Then the student should raise the hand earlier in order to stop me.

11. PROTOCOL 2: If a student is going to ask a question using audio, the student should turn on the Talk button & then raise the electronic hand so I stop talking. The student should then talk, and should turn off the Talk button when done. Assuming that you limit audio to 2 talkers maximum, students will need to turn off the Talk button when not talking in order to enable other students to talk. Note the reversal of protocol here – the hand/bell goes raised/sounded before the audio question. This protocol is all about not talking over each other, just like in a phone conversation. Otherwise, we’d be muting each other all the time. Since my students mostly use Chat instead of Audio, this protocol hasn’t had much use. Students have used audio only for remote presentations.

12. PROTOCOL 3: During the time an instructor is scrolling a window or changing windows or tabs, students may see a blurred display. Therefore, don’t start

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talking about the contents of your display until it is stable and stationary. We discovered this one entirely on our own.

13. PROTOCOL 4: Shut off the instructor’s microphone when a remote student is making a presentation or asking a question via audio. Otherwise, all students will hear annoying echoes from the student’s voice recirculating through the audio stream.

14. PROTOCOL 5: Arrange for remote student to turn in presentation slides ahead of the class period. Remote student video streaming may suffer from low bandwidth, resulting in much video breakup. Until high bandwidth Internet access becomes universal, it is better for the instructor to flip slides when cued vocally by a remote presenter. This requirement should eventually go away.

15. PROTOCOL 6: The instructor should provide a virtual classroom in which students are moderators so they can practice setting up microphones and delivering presentations at any time.

16. PROTOCOL 7: Remote presenters should not wear headsets when they present a talk. Use the computer's speakers. Otherwise, the delayed chatter in the ears becomes annoying.

17. Sometimes the Collaborate server or student networking connections may buffer the audio and then release it in a high-pitched burst. You may see an orange icon next to a student’s name when this buffering occurs. It appears that connecting properly at the start of session (LAN for the classroom machine and Cable/DSL for students at home) may reduce the frequency of this problem. It has never resulted in problems with intelligibility or content loss, so you generally don’t need to worry about it. There are audio algorithms that can drain audio buffers at higher-than-captured rates without up-shifting the pitch, but apparently Blackboard Collaborate developers are not making use of them. There may be technical issues that escape me. This problem is certainly better than audio packet loss; we have not had the latter problem.

18. Require all students who have not used Blackboard Collaborate to attend the first class in person, and encourage them to bring 1/8” ear buds or headphones if they have them. I use part of the first class to practice tools & protocols. I have found that even students who attend the classroom typically run Blackboard Collaborate in the room and watch the computer screen instead of the projection screens, and sometimes raise their electronic hands to get my attention for a question.

19. Repeat questions asked by students in the room. Paraphrase the long ones. Remote students will remind you about this, and you’ll soon get the habit. Next time in planning for student presentations I will hammer this point home, because only about 50% of the students presenting in the room remembered to do this the first time we had student presentations. Anyone used to answering questions from the audience at conferences is familiar with the need for repeating the questions before answering them.

20. I use Tools -> Interaction -> Step Away and turn off my Audio when we take a break in a long class, and the turn these back on when I restart classroom interaction. That’s most of my Blackboard collaborate usage.

21. I set up a default D2L Chat and a D2L Forum for the semester. For team projects I set up an additional D2L Chat and Forum per team, but I don’t restrict access to team members. I have found no reason to set up additional Collaborate rooms.

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22. I am prepared to use Blackboard Collaborate from my office for office hours, although I have not needed to. Email, D2L Forums, and D2L Chat have been sufficient.

23. My graduate course exams tend to be open-ended design problems with no readily-found solutions, so I make them open book and open network, to be completed in class or from home, and allow extended time for completion (midnight of the evening of the 6-8:50 PM class) so that they can take breaks. There are too many unique ways to solve these problems for cheating to be an issue. Cheating would be obvious and that fact is obvious. Open-ended design problems are complicated, which is why I give them enough time to take breaks.

Six pages are enough. I am used to teaching without the physical whiteboard for the Photoshop/Illustrator class. I teach that from my computer -> projector using the tools. I am also used to performing in international computer music webcasts in which we use a Chat Room to coordinate efforts and talk. This approach has been an incremental extension of those practices and has worked very well.