How to teach a class remotely

In the Fall 2019 I taught a graduate class at UMass, Amherst with six students at the Universidad Sergio Arboleda in Bogotá, Colombia. This page has some information on the tools I used.

  • Youtube videos of lectures: playlist, most of these videos were created in the following two ways:
    • with a Mac desktop/laptop using
      • Quicktime player > "New screen recording"; howto
      • Xournal: an open source note taking software
      • Wacom drawing tablet to write. The most basic model the One (small) works very well.
    • with an ipad supporting apple pencil (or the more affordable and rugged crayon) using
      • screen recording; howto (in my case I used a lecture capture technology at UMass to capture the input of the live classes) OR connect the tablet to a data projector that records the video feed.
      • GoodNotes app or Notability

I did small editing to the resulting videos using iMovie, exported to a file (I used low resolution) that I then uploaded to Youtube.

  • I used Slack to communicate with the students and used Hangouts (sharing a link) to hold office virtual office hours. One can share the screen and use an online whiteboard or Xournal.
  • Some other useful apps for collaborating in an online whiteboard are Jamboard, Scribble together

Links:

Note: The views and instructions presented here are my own and they do not represent those of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics or UMass, Amherst.