Birds of a Feather: Best practices for teaching QGIS remotely

probably enable pretty soon and we are live great hello everyone hope you're all doing well uh my name is ojal gandhi i'm coming to you live from india and i'm really excited to be hosting this session on best practices for teaching qgs remotely we just had heard from david and this kind of ties in nicely with his experiences what he had to say so this session is slightly different than others if you're watching on youtube you can obviously continue to do so but we would love for you to come and join this zoom session and share your experience uh it's a more interactive session where we would love to kind of chat and discuss and share best practices so if you've been teaching using qgis or if you have uh experience with that that you'd like to share please join the zoom session and you'll find the link on the website uh a brief intro about me uh i based in india i write uh free and open tutorials at qgis tutorials.com i've been doing that for over a decade now i recently started my own company that's completely focused on training it's one of the qgi certifying organizations so we do provide official qgi certificates for all the participants who take the training and i also do python for spatial analysis and google authentic training i'm also a visiting researcher at university of johannesburg and by visiting now it's online so i'll be teaching that gis applications for urban planning using qgis later this year so let's just think back to start of the year right if you can uh this is how my training used to look like we were all huddled together in a conference room without mass all in person it was great right i could just walk around to anybody who had problem we could you know interact and you know spend the whole day learning about qgis but obviously this has changed and i loved teaching this way and i i was kind of a strong believer of doing in-person trainings and i would love to kind of continue doing that but you know the reality now is that my trainings look like this and i could relate to what david said about the mad scramble that we had switching from offline to online board and uh being in you know i just had left my job and started this online the training business and suddenly being faced with this reality where you know online is the only possibility so i had to quickly figure out how to deal with that and uh in a way it kind of is great you can see my you know every weekend i'm hosting a class and i have participants from across the globe in different time zones with much more diverse crew versus a very local group earlier but it also presents a challenge right you just have a small window into the world everybody is remote uh there are definite technical challenges uh you need to adapt your teaching uh to this board but i've been doing this quite often over the last four months or so and over time uh with a lot of trial and errors i figured out uh a kind of way it kind of works quite well and i'm a bit of a convert now and i really feel that online training can really uh be as effective as in person training so i want to share the start of the session by just sharing some of my experiences and some of the things that i figured out during the sessions so the first one i think uh there's been a lot of research and people have uh talked about it that uh learning online uh poses a lot more cognitive load it's much more stressful so doing an eight hour long workshop online is definitely stressing both for the teacher as well as the participants so uh four hours probably the the maximum limit to this kind of online session that can be effective the shorter the better but with logistics i think i was able to split my eight hr sessions into two four hour weekend sessions and uh that works uh that also along in the sessions i definitely take plenty of breaks uh i remember in my in-person classes uh the people saw you know would come up to me and say hey i have a questions or we would just you know chat over coffee or have lunch together and there was a lot of interesting discussion we came up so i tried to replicate that in the online sessions where we take fairly long breaks uh and though i encourage people to say hey you can feel free to just uh take the break take care of some household shows if you had to and come back fresh but i stick around and you know we chat uh anything related to unrelated to the curriculum and you know it really helps people connect uh if we learn from each other and people definitely tell me that this is as valuable as the formal curriculum that we have in the early days uh people were not really used to having uh online sessions i wasted many precious much of precious time during the class uh debugging video issues screen sharing issues so i kind of now invite people a day before to a test session and uh we just test that if the audio and video works well if they know how to share the screen in my python class also expect people to have much more uh elaborate environment set setup so this also acts as you know a way to for me to verify that they've got installs correctly and this really works well and since i've started doing this we never waste a minute during the actual class and really has the flow of the class well uh another thing similar to what david said uh keeping everything in a single place really helps i was in the early days i was really tempted to say hey let's use uh calendar for scheduling let's use chat for doing this i will send this in a doc here and you know information scattered all across and with people being in different time zones it's asynchronous it's easy to miss a calendar invite so it's just best practice to just have everything in one place and in all communication uh you route it through that and uh you could use moodle for example but i i settled on using a secure page on my website and people i just post uh the schedule the course materials even the notes that we take during the class uh class videos everything is up there and the page stays up for a long time so people will come back and refer to it so definitely adopt this it could be even a shared google doc that could be a central place for all the information another thing that really uh helped me was uh when you are teaching in person i uh you get a lot of non-verbal cues if i'm talking and explaining a concept when i get blank stares back i know that it's not getting through uh and online teaching you don't get that feedback one uh thing that i found really useful is that i'm often sharing screen sharing my screen and doing this hands-on exercises with people i encourage them to keep the videos on and zoom allows you to have this overlay and i'm as i'm teaching i could see the faces i could see people nodding their head and you know i get some cues and that helps it's obviously not 100 as great as in person but definitely as an instructor this is really helpful uh one of the worst sessions i've taught is where everybody had the video off and i was just talking to avoid right that is definitely not uh what you want so that's uh definitely we should definitely try doing that uh so this was some of my takeaways i would uh uh i could relate to some of the stuff that you know david had said but uh there are a lot of people who have been teaching qjis i would love to hear your experiences and we'll you know want to discuss and uh learn more about that so once again if you're watching this on live stream and you want to join us please join us on this zoom session and we can start but for now uh maybe i can uh hand it back to michelle and we can just go around and talk about some of the experiences that the participants have all right great everyone thanks for for that presentation to get us situated um i'm not exactly sure where to start the discussion so um any any ideas from the group um oh really quickly um for those of you who were had the live stream on um youtube please close that tab or turn off the audio because we're getting some echo from that coming through people's mics so go ahead and make sure you've got that youtube session closed um so we're not getting the 20 second audio delay over there and that's for the people in zoom people watching on youtube you can keep your volume on [Laughter] i was wondering if i could uh start just with a question for david um in your setting um of the students that you had you mentioned that you were somewhat surprised that there weren't issues installing the software um what was the mix of like windows and uh pc or windows and mac with the other one yeah yeah i don't have exact numbers but i think it was probably about 50 50. um a couple of students already had had brought their laptops to class and wanted to run it that way um so i saw some of the machines so probably 50 50. yeah thanks david for that that talk i really enjoyed it and java that was a great introduction and i'm wondering if there are any thoughts on um maximum size of an online class i think obviously it's um got to be smaller than a face-to-face maximum and so i um it looked like to double for your courses your you looked like you had maybe six or eight people is is that kind of what you're gearing towards these days yeah yeah i think 10 is probably the kind of a limit for kind of a good experience where because i'm my sessions are all hands-on i'm helping people as they work through exercises and even smaller for more kind of intro to programming classes where you need more hands-on support to people and i think more than 10 you you can definitely go more than that but then it becomes more of a one-way delivery and i think as david said it's probably better done by a video recorded video and then you could have more interactive session later on so for a live interactive session maybe 10 is so how do you shift from um from doing like if you work really hands-on in person like how do you make that shift online is it like screen sharing or how do you like because when i teach in person i'm always looking over people's shoulder and saying oh i see you know like let's change this about your workflow to make to troubleshoot or make something work so how how do you do that now that it's online yeah for me i think the screen sharing works i uh what i tell everybody is that if you get stuck and if you need help just share your screen and that allows me to see what's going on there and after kind of as we work through each exercise i ask people i give them a little challenge uh after each class and once they kind of do it each one shares the screen so they get to the idea of sharing the screen and showing the work and that kind of works i've not had an issue where uh i was not able to debug something just by looking at the screen um so i think that i was more worried about that but it hasn't been that big of a problem again having a small group helps i think i could do this probably if there were 30 people and everybody's asking for the help yeah and i've found that uh at least my my experience in the latter part of spring semester is that office hours are expanded uh fourfold i had a lot of one-on-one chats with students who were having trouble um and just you know at night weekends we would just sort of have meetings to keep everybody on board so i had a question and this is something that i find problematic to figure it out is the question about having your video on or not because you're right if you can't see the faces of the students you don't know if you see confusion or just those kind of um a signal they're lost or not kind of um keeping up but at the same time asking people to turn on their video can especially when people are in their homes or in places it's it's sort of a big ask um if you can kind of think about some people that might not want to show where they are if they don't have a computer that's capable of doing zoom backgrounds or whatever it is how i i'm wondering about an alternative that can be used for um getting feedback from students without requiring that video and i think one thing like michelle in the um tutorial that you did last week you had those polls where you could stop and ask people like where are you at like that seems like a good tool and i'm wondering if we can talk about more of those kind of feedback things that are comfortable for the students if they don't have a video on yeah i think i would love to know about polls i've heard people use that i've not used it so far but i would love to hear how people have used it i definitely see that some people are not comfortable sharing the video and i don't force them i think that it's definitely their choice and you know if uh at least some people do that uh it's it's great uh another kind of thing that helps is uh i use zoom and there's this reaction thing so i ask everybody everybody caught it and if they give a thumbs up or not so that is kind of a little walk around but uh it's it's it's definitely harder to do that uh kind of ask everybody and then people are explicitly telling verses that a lot of time people are not even comfortable sharing that they didn't get the concept but you know when you're in person you could kind of see that so it takes a bit of you know practice and workarounds but yeah i would love to hear about polls i've not used that but if anybody has has used poles uh i would love to see how you can use them and how effective they are yeah when i when i've taught um this has just been obviously the last couple months or i've shifted like these really large in-person uh learning sessions workshops uh to online in in zoom that's the tool we've been using at uc davis library and data lab and um zoom has uh they have the reactions but also in the participants menu there is buttons for yes or no or go slower go faster and a couple other uh options so i will ask students to open up that toolbar and um and tell me like you know the answer yes or no to a question and it's anonymous so that's really helpful for the folks who um you know maybe are a little bit hesitant to say that they don't understand something and they don't want everyone to to know um that that can be really helpful and that we just kind of get a poll of like okay i know i've got 20 participants and three of them still haven't for example like downloaded the data yet they need some more time so that can be helpful for pacing just to know um which is it's kind of different because in in my in-person classes they often won't tell me that even if we use like the carpentry style um sticky note system with the two colors for like stop and go um so it's kind of interesting that you can actually get better feedback sometimes in the online sessions because it is completely anonymous and i find in in person people don't want to always be the person that's slowing things down but no one knows in the zoom session another thing that i've seen happen is that uh people uh sometimes what i do is once i end my workshop i'll say i'll stick around if somebody uh what has more questions or wants me to repeat something i often have people coming after the class and say hey can you just repeat that part i didn't get it so i think maybe having that kind of smaller forum and you know people don't want to slow down the class so they feel bad asking a question slow down so just uh kind of budgeting the extra half an hour after the class to have a more one-to-one or in a smaller group session that might be a way to deal with that as well i'm just seeing a couple comments both in the zoom and the youtube chat that um bandwidth is a can be a big issue with certain people if they don't have a good connection um that it's harder for them to keep their video on as well as may bog down their their computing system as well um if they're their process is working harder yeah yeah kurt i saw that you recently taught your workshop online i would love to hear your experience how did that go yeah i taught an online workshop and it had way too many people had 50 participants registered and 40 that showed up so it was a lot to keep track of and i used those reactions to kind of judge the pacing of the course if i got mostly thumbs up we would just continue i think you know i think in general teaching gis and qgis is most challenging when there's a big disparity between the slowest and the fastest student in the course and i was really fortunate everyone seemed to be kind of going at the same pace which really helped us keep on schedule and keep things moving along but in the future i would uh aim to have a greatly reduced number of students it was a little overwhelming another consideration i've thought of is that students taking an online course i think obviously ideally they have multiple monitors one for the zoom session and one for qgis so they can follow along and have cutis in another window but i would think the majority of people are just working off a laptop and with that small screen real estate that's going to be a big challenge for a lot of students to have to minimize zoom and open up qgis and go back and forth so i don't know if anyone's has any experiences or thoughts dealing with that issue one of the things i do in in my workshops is to tell people straight up at the beginning that this is going to work better if you have two monitors or a really large monitor and then if they encourage them that if they don't have both uh don't have two monitors that they should just follow along and watch and then i make sure that i have the written materials available so they can go back and try after after the video's over because i i can't imagine trying to watch a video and do qjs on one tiny monitor that's just too much and also having a good document like that that the students know that they can always look to for reference then they're not also trying to take notes necessarily at the same time because then they have something to refer to because then that would be zoom and writing and so most of my teaching is one-on-one a lot of one-on-one consultations and troubleshooting and um one thing i've liked about working remotely is that um it used to be someone would come into our desk and they'd be having their laptop next to them they're trying to save their batteries so their video is very dim and i'm like looking at it from an angle and trying to see what's going on over there but now if they share their screen i can just see exactly what they see and it's very clear and that's been been wonderful but then one other thing i've noticed or i figured out kind of belatedly is that you know we're doing these sessions and often i'm demonstrating something so they can do it and it used to be when i was in person they would be writing everything down and taking good notes and now i realize i can just hit record and then send them a copy of that so if anything um you know didn't get into their notes they can just watch it again and and pick up that missing missing point so it's been quite an improvement actually working remotely yeah i'll echo that um in zoom if you're not familiar you can just record and it emails you the transcript i guess after the session's over i said you can just share that link with everybody that was in the class or people that couldn't show up or whatever um so that plus what michelle and diane said having if you have a written transcript or workbook or whatever i think those two things are really helpful yeah definitely i think video is definitely a blessing in this uh teaching remotely because i also record all my sessions and there are times where people just dropped off and missed like 15 minutes and they could always catch up that on the video and on the written material as well i think i also shared my material a week in advance so a lot of people say it just helps us get more familiar with the class material and what's going to be covered uh i definitely had people say that it's hard to keep up with the teaching and doing stuff in qgs so i'm slowly trying to adapt my material and i've done this for my python course where i just say hey everybody uh it's going to be a mix of lectures and hands-on so for 10 minutes i'm going to talk and explain this concept just watch and see me do things and then i give them a little exercise and challenge and and now you go and figure this out and i'll help you and walk you through it so i think that works better uh versus me time to say hey let's just do this one step let's do the next one let's do you know third one so it just you know adapting a material also slightly is needed i've not done that for all my qgs courses but it should definitely help if we you know split the kind of hands-on and the instruction [Music] mode so one question i'm seeing over um that's coming through on the youtube chat is about group work and how um how have people approached group assignments given that most people are remote do you have strategies for that or if you can give some examples of things that have worked or haven't worked that might be fun to discuss i'm not sure how relevant this is um this isn't necessarily something that i've used for qjs but i do have um some students that are co-building a website right now and i just made a group for them in microsoft teams because we have um that space here at my university and there are places where they can have their discussions and their files all in one space there and maybe i'm not familiar with moodle but something that might have that same kind of space where everything associated with a project can be in that same spot and people can have discussions and share files in that same logic so just having that centralized spot like um you were mentioning in your introduction seems like a no-brainer yeah and i believe zoom also has i think some versions of zoom has this rooms where you can split people and they can discuss separately i've not used that because my groups are quite small but it could be also an option where you can give individual projects to small groups they can talk and come back regroup after some time so oh you know last week we had the two introductory workshops um alina millette who was leading the spanish language workshop reported that she well she was using the breakout rooms and dividing her zoom participants into those rooms where there was you know i don't know how many maybe 10 or so per room and she said it actually worked out really well she was then floating between those rooms um it was great to see that you know the students were working with each other and helping each other out um when she was entering the room i've also sometimes tried to identify students who are doing similar type projects so they're not working on the same project but they have similar um problems data sets etc and i have them sort of team up and be study buddies of sorts either formerly in person or now with a google uh chat room or google me breakout the breakouts are great because then i think that allows for more interactivity from the people that are there so they know they're just talking to each other and they don't have to you know if there are 30 people in the group if it's gotten that big yeah i see comment from uh han since he's talking about blended learning uh and this is something that i've been interested in a while and i wanted to definitely try it where you kind of limit your in-person contact to just questions and discussions and have the learning happen uh over videos and written materials i've not done it yet but i would love to hear anybody else's experience if you've tried something on the similar lines maybe i can explain a bit yeah so i've been uh trying to do it in this way and i felt that moving from face to face to to blend it even more uh gives a more active participation of the students when i'm in class they really feel that i need to spoon in every detail and you know even unzipping a zip file and those things well you can really get rid of that just have your stuff on the platform have most things in in videos and uh just ask them to share the screen privately with you if they are stuck and it can be in any time and meanwhile you're doing other other work or prepare new courses and do you then have a fixed time where they could the group meets and you have a discussion yes we plan those we use moodle with big blue button and we can do their kahoots as i wrote in the chat so we do a quiz and then we see that they are really eager to participate you also want your checks and balances how far they are you can get all the statistics from kahoot and uh yeah that works well yep that's a it's a great tip i think it's definitely better use of the time and the best use of the in-person time for discussion so i would definitely try to incorporate some of that i see a question in the chat about um any issues with accessing resources from campus network remotely and in my experience we didn't have any issues moodle the g suite tools um were all accessible we our it staff has even set it up now so that we can log into our lab machines remotely if if need be so uh i don't think we'll have that need since it seems like everybody can get qgis up and running but if for some reason they can't we can have them log in and access the campus network campus lab yeah our library um is working on plans for making access to certain software that traditionally students would use on our public computers and obviously with open source software that's not nearly the issue it is with other other software programs so that's been a great thing with qgis what has anyone tried using osgo live or some kind of uh virtual machine that students load so that it comes complete with tutorials and and uh sample data it's been a little while but i've used that approach for face-to-face workshops before and it worked really well so it is nice having everything bundled that way and i think it could be a really good strategy for uh you know remote course as well there was a talk during the the oyster uk conference last month and uh i don't remember somebody presented that they use like a remote environment on aws to spin up a complete functioning qgis environment and that could be again if people don't have access to a powerful machine or they don't have a computer that can run fuji this could be a way to set up your environment uh with data and with the configuration that you want that people can just success there's a question on youtube chat um is anyone team taught during distance teaching and if so do you have any comments on that experience could you repeat that i missed that with remote uh teaching have you worked with the team to co-teach of course and what has worked or not so i haven't done team teaching in in the sense that like we have equal presenters but the way that i've done workshops especially when we have big ones like the intro to qgis that we just did last week for this conference and then a couple weeks ago for um just the data lab workshop we had you know more than 50 people uh signed up to take this class and it's done in um and zoom so we have uh what we call we call them helpers kind of similar to like the way that the carpentries has helpers for in-person workshops so um everyone has a very defined role which i think helps people know how to how to work together um where we have an instructor role and then we have helper roles and the helpers know like okay my job is to keep track of like the chat board and make sure that people get their questions answered and then also to alert the instructor for um if there's questions the instructor should demonstrate or answer questions you know to the whole group um but i could see if you had um co-instructors that could also work but i think part of it since you don't have the verbal cues you know that and you know talking to people on the side that you would in person i think having those instructor roles really defined ahead of time is going to help some of that run a little bit more smoothly yeah i i for one i know that i am horrible at multitasking with screens and spaces and so having somebody else um look at questions coming in and again that's again being able to even i don't know how well i would do with seeing people's faces when i'm trying to work on a screen if i have on monitors um but at least you're right the the the video gives you more of an immediate sense back in your periphery you can at least catch some of that but i cannot read chats when i'm in the middle of trying to do something that i have to stop and move over so yeah definitely just you know running events uh with client questions and teaching just by yourself is a bad idea and it never works well so you definitely need a co-host or somebody else uh helping the questions yeah that approach worked very well this spring when uh hans von der cross and i taught a seven series webinar on our qgis hydro material and book and one of us would be going through the demo and the other would be monitoring the chat and answering questions and uh that division of labor worked really well yeah i think it's key like if you're trying to do a larger workshop or teach a larger class like you really can't well you probably other people maybe could i can't do that well by myself like it it really like diane said like i also cannot monitor the chat at the same time as teaching and because the teaching requires already looking at materials and what i'm doing on my screen that i'm sharing like that's already trying to handle two things we add in like all of the participant tools for zoom or whatever platform you're using it's it's too much for one person's brain to track so i think having having assistance of some sort is is really key to making some of this work well and it looks very smooth on the surface but you may be frantically chatting with each other that no one else sees but i i think this goes back to what hans was saying too that if you build learning materials and snippets that people can use before they come to the class then the class is mostly discussions about those things perhaps and then maybe going through um a demonstration and then doing a very paired down hands-on practice to kind of get it too so i think in my mind right now a lot of this just sounds like it comes down to a lot more organization before the class happens and that's like the biggest difference between online and in person you can't wing it as much so i'd like to put in a plug and remind everyone i know several on this session are aware of it already but there is a qgis certification program and so you can apply if you haven't already and you basically get your materials reviewed and if you're approved you become a certified um instructor an organization that can provide qgis certificates to students who pass your courses or take your workshops whatever the case may be and um there are so they're official qgis certificates and each certificate comes with a you donate 20 euros to the qgis project for every certificate so it can also be a way for institutions that have trouble contributing to qgis to actually start contributing financially to qgis through the certificate program i know that's working for hans at ihe delft so i put the link in the the zoom chat here and so if you're not already a certified instructor it sounds like some of you should be or could be could you talk a little bit about what's involved with that um just so that all of us aren't going over there to read the instructions yeah yeah sure so so um the certification program basically requires you're asked to provide um your uh your curriculum you know or if it's a big curriculum you have multiple courses at least an example of that because we like to check it for make sure it's up to date that it's not mixing and matching proprietary and open source in the same lesson for example that it's a pure qgis curriculum that's those kind of things are important um there's also if there's a national qgis user group like qgis us you you are um asked to provide that information and then um the the team reviewing the materials will check in with that user group to make sure that you have a good reputation um in your in your country in your community and um and and it's and so that that's basically the review process and then the qgis project steering committee makes the final determination uh on that and then um you're basically set up with the qgis certification platform and so at that point you can go in and set up your own learning center like a location where your courses are or at least where they're headquartered in a virtual environment and you can set up your own courses and dates and then there's tools in the platform for importing you know a csv of all the students are going to get a certificate and it will generate all the certificates um as pdfs and email them to the students so that the platform is is rather nice at this point for um delivering those certificates to the students at the end and each certificate comes with a little id number so potential employers can go and look up to make sure that's a valid certificate in in the qgis system um so that that's it in a nutshell and like i said at the end of a course i usually wrap in the 20 euro fee into my courses and pass that on to the the client or whoever was paying for the workshop um so that that that that's a fee at the end of the course or the end of the semester that you basically ask qgis for an invoice for that and pay the fee back to qgis so it is a really nice way to financially support the project yeah i agree i think this i also find this much easier to have organizations uh you know donate to qgi's this way because there's a perceived value to the certificate and they're much more willing to uh be extra for those certificates versus if you just ask them to donate so really great way to have those bundling as part of the the fees that we're charging and even individuals have seen that people do uh see the value and are willing to pay a little extra for the certificate so uh love that that's supporting the qgs project as well and i forgot to mention one other factor that you're asked to provide which is contributions to the qgis project and that can be almost anything it can be publishing open courseware it can be you know creating videos it can be financial contributions it can be contributing code it can be writing books it can be can be all sorts of things but you're that's another focus of the program is trying to get more people to contribute to the project in some way and and since the focus of this is education getting more people to publish their open curriculum so that it can be used by by others yeah that's that is so valuable when people have workflows that you can you don't have to build from scratch and just sharing that knowledge for everybody is i've definitely taken advantage of that from some people so yeah i think we all have i mean i think i've used materials from a lot of the people that are on this uh zoom chat right now so in thinking about um the materials and where you store them what are some of your favorite places like and tools to use like i like to put my stuff on github and do a readme on github because that way anyone can send me pull requests for my spelling mistakes and such but um what what kinds of stuff do you guys use what what's been successful what what have you ditched because it's not working well yeah i really like using i'll go ahead first all right so i i used to i i put my stuff on github i use markdown r markdown and that provides a nice interface to create my materials and i publish that i also found that it's just easier to kind of map that github page to a website uh that just gives a better visibility than just having a github repository somewhere but yeah github is great you can publish stuff there and it maintains the version control everything and i just use i put all my data etc on google drive and share those links from the class materials page right yeah i found great success with using github and um you know if you have a nice readme you can just turn that into a github pages website which works really well um and then i've created a i guess an official release which basically zips up the whole repository and then i add a link to that to the readme although the strange part is that it's like this nesting problem where now the zip file that has the readme doesn't have the link to so then i have to do it again and anticipate what the file name is going to be but um beside that little besides that little hiccup um it's worked really well and usually like the download links are super fast for people to download it's it's they've they've got good bandwidth so yeah one of the other advantages i find to using github is that it lets people um get my materials more quickly so someone can can just fork the repository and have the materials to work on and because i i license all my stuff open obviously i'm wearing the qgis shirt so i'm a big fan of that um so i i think that it's nice to have that and make it super easy for someone to just grab the materials and then they can edit as they need to um so that they can use it like i just found out yesterday or the day before that a group at ucla is going to be using my materials that i taught last week they're going to be modifying them and teaching them in a workshop that's going to happen a week from now so i'm really glad that they just can fork that and be able to use it right away and that is a great shirt yeah there's a really good question in the chat that i have too um do folks have a favorite mirroring app for showing phone screens on a computer so you can train mobile field use does anyone know of an app that you can use to share the phone screen i know i've seen lutra consulting workshops where they um which we'll have next friday where they share their phone screen but i don't know what they're using i i did use an app a while back i forget the name of it it's been a while but i used to teach open data kit free data collection and and that used to work well you install the app on your phone and have people go to a web link which kind of shows uh what's in the screen i'll try to dig that up and put it in the chat and i see that hans has just said he uses screen mirror for his android and that works well for him it sounds like what usher is describing so you have a web link and then an app and it links to each other and you have in browser view of your phone screen and i haven't tried this but i wonder if you have your desktop logged into zoom and also your phone if you could share your phone screen directly to the chat again i haven't tried that but it seems like that would be a possibility i'm googling it now and it looks like at least on android yes you can this it probably isn't widely applicable but there there is um certain settings that your zoom subscription and in my case for example um we do not allow record um copying of the chat and keeping it so however your zoom is set up can change some of these options and how things go back and forth and part of the reason for that is that we have a medical school that does a lot of things with hipaa compliant things and they're like we'll just turn this off so that you don't have the possibility of getting some of this data so that's just something to think about when um you're at your institution and you want to do something with your zoom it may not have the same permissions that other people do how much time do people's i was just go ahead i was just going to say i can't even copy and paste from chat so it's frustrating sometimes but it makes sense i was just going to ask a question how much time do you all spend on dealing with licensing issues for qgis but don't bump yeah i mean uh related to that actually um anecdotally by twitter it seems like there's a lot of instructors during um you know when covet 19 hit and canvases got closed that people who had been teaching using proprietary software were suddenly looking for open alternatives to switch to because students were having trouble connecting to campus license servers and things like that and i wonder if um people are have other experiences like that where people are starting to adopt to teaching with open source software like qgis um simply because of the challenges of teaching online with with this pandemic going on i haven't seen a switch yet at davis that could just be because we're still in summer sessions um i have had folks emailing me with questions about how to access the proprietary software and our license just got switched to a situation where you have to be on the campus network in order to use the other softwares that requires a license so um so i think we may be seeing that switchover happen probably after fall when we've got some challenges and but i'm not sure we'll we'll have to see i definitely recommend qgis a lot especially for our mac users on campus which is a significant portion of of our gis users uh just makes life easier to be able to install it directly and not have to do any fancy work with different operating systems is there anyone here who um has not spoken yet would like to share anything related to the topic or any questions anything we could troubleshoot or brainstorm on uh stuff that's not working that you just want the mind hive to work on i have one thing that we're all now using zoom here and we're of course big fan of open source so in my place it's it's not allowed to use zoom so we use open source tools for our teaching and i've already seen uh david mentioning moodle we use the same but we also have plugins for moodle like big blue button and we are now having our own yitzi and yeah it all works quite fine too i would say so are you guys also considering using open source tools for your teaching that's a it's a great question i've kind of looked into the big blue button but i think the configuration and installation seems a bit challenging and i'm just worried about uh having it work uh well for people so it's just a matter of trying out and testing which i have not done but getting your recommendation and seeing that it works well for you i'm i'm more encouraged to now give it a shot and definitely would love to have an open source alternative to zoom that we could all adopt and teach using that yeah i know for me i've i've stuck with zoom just because um it works and uh you know it eliminates one piece of uh the puzzle while teaching in a challenging environment um i'd like to use jitsi but uh the the the standard jitsi service i found to be a little unreliable and um but i i was talking with hans yesterday um privately using jitsi and it was the jitsi that he had installed that they installed at ihe delft on their server and in that and then you know installed that way it worked really well so i think for an institution like that jitsi could be a good alternative um personally as kind of a private instructor that might be a little more work to set up than i'm wanting to take on but um i think it's going to become a better and better option going forward and as i mentioned in my talk i've sort of um resigned to using g suite tools google me and google chat and sort of thinking about the student perspective and not asking them to juggle three or four different platforms i think is important um they already have a lot on their plates trying to manage four courses remotely or most of them remotely and so i think just for their benefit trying to streamline the the tools that we use has made their lives easier oh yeah that's a great yeah yeah streamlining it and and so like keith a lot of times some of the students that i interact with it's a one-on-one or an introductory kind of thing and sometimes i'm interacting with students that are um very new to software period much less gis and so starting in a place that they may have already used zoom for other classes or whatever platform it is that they're already used to that has some kind of screen sharing component so that you can show them exactly what you're doing when you're loading a software starting things it's it's like the the best hand holding i think you can do so just finding that base level of what they know and then using that screen sharing just to try and get somebody that's never um unzipped a file before to understand what that means i think that's a really good point we don't want to be adding a cognitive load on top of already learning new software but then having to learn the the sharing software as well but i do like the idea of open source teaching tools um you know i'm using zoom because that's what we have available you know in my institution um they were just like here use this and it works great but i think you know as we have more time to think about things i think picking a platform for um like for teaching reasons makes more sense than just use the thing that we have currently i think matching that to our needs is probably a good choice but at the same time since a lot of us were thrown into this unexpectedly using what is available and what's currently working is also a good choice until we get the chance to take a breath and figure out you know what is the actual best option yeah and it depends on the student too like you said the kind of load if they already know other things then use the thing that's best for teaching that we end up finding so yeah it'll develop it'll be a growing beast so i think unless unless i've got my time zones mixed up i think we're right about it time for this uh for this session so um i'd like to thank everyone for joining uh this has been really informative and i think a good discussion to to keep continuing and um you know maybe we can do this again sometime soon and touch base so thank you again and uh thank you to all for giving us the presentation to get us started and thank you everyone for sharing your thoughts and ideas thank you please thanks hosts

Channel: QGIS North America

Views: 784

Keywords:

Id: 7bi7czeRUx4

Length: 55min 35sec (3335 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020