How are we all managing?

[ItalianHat]

It's the end of a 2nd week of teaching for me. Online is working OK - the students are saying they're already very tired though! I think it's about switching from the complete lack of structure of lockdown (for them - I was pretty busy!) back to timetables and starting seminars at 9am and so on.

And today's hollow laugh was an email from our IT managers which included the statement that: "IT staff are working into the evenings and at weekends to overcome the backlog of requests"

Tiny violins, please ...

It's of a level of clodhoppery that rivals an email sent to us from the teaching administrative staff manager in the June exams period, which told us that academic staff would have to do some time-consuming admin task, because professional staff "did not have space in their workloads."

I mean, I know everyone's working over & above, but why is it the academic staff who have to applaud everybody else (and do parts of their work for them), when we routinely work evenings & weekends.

Grrrrr.

But other than that - it's nice working with the students again, although online can be frustrating at times. However, I don't think it'd be any more frustrating than masked & at 2m distance, trying to run a seminar with desks & seats set out in socially-distanced rows.

I find I need a whole lot more energy for the online experience - just keeping it all going, keep everyone engaged, being super friendly and enthusiastic - I dread to think what it will be like when we have some really heavy, bleak themes to deal with.

I'm doing face to face in masks and online on Zoom. Both are new, both have tricky bits and both are really really tiring for this reason!

Finding the socially distanced part of f2f teaching tricky enough (can't always hear the students, can't read their faces, breathing and talking when blinded by steamed glasses).

That's before you even factor juggling this with the online students and their needs and the sound and vision issues ...

It's been a ride.

I have encountered so many technology fails trying to record my asychronous lectures. I've been told to not spend so much time, don't be a perfectionist. But I'm not being a perfectionist - not being a perfectionist wouldn't help a piece of software that refuses to run, a recording that freezes 10 min in and all the rest of my lecture went no where (I suppose I could just post the 10 mins...), powerpoint that randomly decides to show no images (WTF? it never did this before?), and so on. Then stitching together all these bits with a piece of software made for lecture capture of live sessions and not for video editing just takes time.

Italian - we got that back end of last semester too, the Professional staff "had full workloads" especially with some off on furlough, so we had to do extra for our tasks, PLUS theirs. So, WTF did you furlough them???? Nightmare.

mumuration not horrid old Panopto is it? I've been using Zoom recordings of my meetings and they are much more straightforward. I think the unis really need to invest in some decent video editing software, students aren't going to be happy with home-made crappy videos with laptop cameras up our noses for ever...

Multi directional mics would be a start.

I'm having issues with panopto randomly deciding to show a pop up right at the end of my recording saying it for some reason has crashed and isn't recording. It's infuriating and wasting so much of my time.

I've decided to avoid trying to do any break out rooms online after hearing about the diasters that have happened for my colleagues.

First face to face session is this week. We have a lot of students who don't have English as a first language and I'm dreading hours of me ear cupping trying to hear what they're saying through a mask from meters away.

We have been having so many hilarious but time consuming fails with auto audio capture. Oh brave new world.

Teams breakout rooms aren't functional, the uni have announced.

Zoom breakout rooms are great, straightforward to use, they don't record though (if you are recording the whole session), The absolutely best discussion the students have had this week is in Zoom breakout rooms, so don't be put off them completely.

Zoom recordings are working quite well for me too. I wanted to put together something more polished but that would require editing, which leads to large files and we don’t have the server space and can’t upload large files to the VLE. We were told not to use YouTube, although lots of the tech support how-to-do-it material has been on YouTube. So it’s a little frustrating. Also, automatic transcription software can’t cope with technical terms and editing it takes hours.

I’m reasonably happy with my recorded lectures but it took me a very long time to make them, and I don’t yet have anything for January - March. I was hoping we’d be back to ‘normal’ after Christmas but now I doubt it. So now I’ll need to make more recordings form next term during this teaching term. I can always give up sleep, can’t I?

I'm using backboard collaborate for online teaching. I'm not doing any panopto type recording. It's all live lectures but I do record them for anyone who's missed it. I do break out rooms and activities to try and keep them engaged.

My camera has stopped working in BB if I use chrome but is OK in teams so it's not my camera. I'm having to use Edge instead of chr which is annoying.

@Bellesavage

Would it be possible to ask your students to type their questions in the chat window?

Could you keep an eye on that thread and /or ask them to use the ' raise my hand' function to highlight that they have posted a question? Make sure any recording includes the chat, too.

What is the issue with the breakout rooms in Teams? I’m only doing a tiny bit of my teaching online but was planning to use that function when I do.

@Poppingnostopping

Teams breakout rooms aren't functional, the uni have announced.

Zoom breakout rooms are great, straightforward to use, they don't record though (if you are recording the whole session), The absolutely best discussion the students have had this week is in Zoom breakout rooms, so don't be put off them completely.

We are banned from zoom

I'm relying on hand raising, polling, chat functions and hopefully the quieter students getting braver a few weeks in.

I’m finding it’s taking me 2-3 times as long to prepare for teaching online and face to face. I’m easily doing double my hours (I’m part-time) each week. Yes, we all expect to chip in a bit extra in exceptional times & at the start of the academic year, but I’ve been working like this for about 8 weeks now & exhausted and getting a bit hacked off about it. My health is going downhill as I’m in front of the computer every night and my poor DC are bearing the brunt as I have to say I can’t read bedtime stories, I have to go and work. It sucks, to say the least.

There seems to be zero recognition that this is having an impact upon workloads. I know that services such as Tech and Timetabling are also working all the hours, it’s not exclusive to academics in my institution, it seems.

Our students can remove masks once sat at individual desks, but they feel exposed all sat individually, and so discussion isn’t as comfortable as usual. Quite a few not wearing masks either, which we can’t challenge in case exempt.

I feel such a pressure to perform face to face to make the risks they take travelling in worthwhile (overwhelming majority are local commuters) AND such high expectations to provide high quality online content.

Can’t see an end in sight 🤷‍♀️

We have an institutional Zoom license, but it was a pain to argue for it, so glad we did now. I don't know the issue with Teams/breakout rooms, just that after a lot of frustration, the tech people said to abandon that function as they were still developing it...

I mean Teams software people were developing it, not our people.

popping, yes, it's Panopto. That's the only one we're "officially" meant to use, because it comes with captioning (crap, but you can edit it) but they've relaxed a bit and let people record via Teams and PPT (and now Teams has captions, I think?). And Panopto was out across Europe for a few hours this morning - the morning I was planning to record a bunch of lectures as a rare space of hours without meetings. I have once again lost a lot of time talking to nothing, as it didn't say it wasn't recording until I finished...

We're also banned from Zoom. It doesn't appear to be a money thing (or maybe you need to pay for what they want), they claimed it had to do with data protection or something. But it seems many other UK Uni's, and even the gov't, seem to be successfully using it, so I don't understand how it can be an issue for just us. We've been told that if we're invited to a meeting that is happening on Zoom, if it's something we absolutely MUST go to, then we can attend, but be aware its unsecure, or something like that.

I realised Panopto was out as well. I quite like Zoom for recordings, I prefer the little thumbnail of myself, much better than my larger face on Panopto. You do get captions on Zoom in the online links, but if you want to download, they disappear. You get a separate text file though so you can add them together in a video editor, my dd has done this for me. I keep switching between the two, Panopto is quite buggy and students often report it's hard to watch, I don't like it but it's probably the least worst...

murmuration and nothing worse than getting to the end of a lecture and realising it hasn't recorded or there's a problem, it's so tiring trying to lecture to a screen and then to have to do it again....argh!

@murmuration If you record on Teams then upload to Stream the captioning is automatic.
We're not allowed to use Zoom either and I've found this the best way to record.

Hi all,

I occasionally post here, currently under a namechange. Sorry to say, but I've just come across this thread being shared on twitter so wanted to let people know in case it makes anyone uncomfortable continuing to comment. Link here: twitter.com/jessmeacham/status/1313925427107332101/photo/1

And people on the Twitter conversation call MN snarky!

And ugh NC coming up.

Sorry all, for being soooo awful that someone feels the necessity to bitch about me (out of context) on a completely different platform.

Should we ask to get this thread pulled?

It's none of my business really, but I think maybe leave it so people can see?