For today’s session of THL431 (Lutheran Doctrine 1), I have five students in the classroom and six connected through Zoom. Our topic this week has been the Doctrine of God, part of which included a bit of history on the developing expression of the Trinity in the church. I had spoken of the Council of Nicea in class and the protagonist Athanasius. The walkabout followed…
One of the last challenges I have faced in this project is integrating audio from remote participants in such a way that classroom students can hear them clearly. To solve this issue I’ve patched the Yamaha mixer into the room sound system by disconnecting the sound system from the projector. Now students in the classroom can hear clearly the remote students, my own voice is amplified, and the mixer through a loopback feature is able to include that audio in the recording made by Zoom. We have now solved both the video problem by using an iPad monitor connected to the projector and we have solved the audio problem by bypassing the projector and plugging directly into the amplifier on the ceiling.
In all my classes, students may freely choose whether to attend in person or remotely and switch between those modalities. It seems to me, that this kind of multi-modality provides not only an advantage during the pandemic but also opens up possibilities for expanding enrollments in classes, especially under-enrolled classes like Greek, in a post-pandemic context.
Now that the audio and video basic problems have been solved, I’m going to be monitoring feedback from students to tweak approaches and work on improving effectiveness. I do want to explore the possibility of adjusting equalizer settings so as to improve the ability of students to hear upper tones and consonants from me as I’m speaking through a mask.
One of the challenges of this work over a longer period is the setup time. It typically takes me a good 20 minutes to unpack, put in place, and double check the equipment settings and the equipment itself prior to class. Since it is best to open the Zom session at least 10 minutes before class, that means I need to access the classroom 30 minutes before the start of class. That of course is not a viable operational approach in classrooms that need to be used to the max. Therefore some kind of dedicated room or dedicated storage in a room will be necessary to speed the setup process.
Overall, I’m pleased with what we’ve been able to do so far. It is a lot of work. but it has given distinct options to students.
After one week , the hyflex model has helped
Still challenging after one week are
I remain committed to my plans for the benefits to the students. I expect the challenges to recede.
After a week of experimenting, I have discovered it takes 20 to 25 minutes to set up and tear down a classroom using this hyflex model. I am quite thankful that, for all of my classes, none has a course meeting before or after mine in the rooms that I use. So it’s working this semester, but in another context it might not work so well. Audio from remote participants is still a work in progress but everything else has settled in rather well. There is one additional challenge. It’s the lighting in the rooms. I can’t turn off the lights in front of the screen. All the lights are either on or off. Would that the rooms had been designed better.
But overall the first week has worked. Next week, the challenge is to become more efficient.
While teaching in a hyflex way, I was seeking a way to be sure that students in the classroom seem the same thing on the screen as did the students online. The solution was to connect my iPad to the room projector and log the iPad into the Zoom session. But I quickly learned I had to turn off the audio with the iPad or I would get a loopback feedback in the room. I therefore must route the sound from the remote student thorugh my laptop speakers. I can hear it, but the sound is not sufficient for the rest of the class. More to figure out
