Why Zoom sucks for teaching and always will.

In this post I want to point out at the useless but very active discussion how to effectively use Zoom for teaching. 

The answer is - you CANNOT effectively use Zoom for teaching. 

Zoom, Skype, WebEx, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or any other meeting software will never be good for teaching.

Of course, to understand and accept that, one needs to know what teaching is and is about.

For may educators, including the top educators, researchers and administrators, and especially university professors, teaching is no different from animal training, from training circus animals doing tricks.

If teaching would have been simply pouring knowledge from a "knowledge storage" (a.k.a. a teacher) into an empty vessel (a.k.a a student) then Zoom would be sufficient. In fact, today Zoom is the best from all existing platforms. Naturally it means, if Zoom is bad, then other platforms are even worse. The reason for that is simply - all the platforms are not designed for teaching, or we can say, they designed not for teaching, the designed for online meetings. It "meetings" would be the same as "teaching", then the platforms would work.

But teaching is not that. Teaching is not an online meeting.

Well, teaching is not JUST an online meeting where participants talk to each other.

What is teaching?

I've got a post for that:

What is Teaching?

And anther one:

A handbook for a science teacher.

In short, at its heart, teaching is the process of helping learners to learn. And learning is indeed based on communication. If one-on-one communication would have been possible, then, again, Zoom, with some improvements on teacher's side, would be fine. 

For example, as everyone else, I started from just a computer and a web camera. However, very quickly I realized, that I cannot teach PHYSICS that way. And I had to elevate my teaching studio to a new level. Two pictures below show my current equipment.

I use now two touchscreen monitors, four cameras, and lots of stuff for lecture experiments. And THAT helped A LOT to advance students' understanding of the material.

But even this setup is extremely deficient for teaching a class.

Teaching requires an effective group communication. That requires a an ability to organize, manage and monitor communication between students. That requires a completely different technological instrument. 

There are many video conferencing tools, but none of them is good for teaching. Zoom is just not as bad as all other are. But even in Zoom some simple adjustments - specifically for better teaching - could be done, and yet they didn't. The guiding principle is simple - observe how a good teacher interacts with students and try to incorporate that interaction into your platform. Well, the key term is "good". For starters, a good teacher does not act like a general commanding solders telling them what to do (much more on this matter in many other posts, i.e. this one). Another example - when students work in groups, a good teacher monitors at the same time the whole class, and each individual group and can quickly switch between groups, as well as from an in-group discussion to a full-class discussion, and back. Zoom does not allow anything like that. But could, if it would modify accordingly the format of break out rooms.

 

A teacher needs to be able to do much more than just to see students. A teacher need to see the work of every (any!) student (and of course communicate with any student). And a teacher needs to be able to create and re-create collaborative groups and observe the group work and participate in that work. And this is just the bare minimum any teaching collaborative technology must do. Ideally, students should feel immersed in the same learning environment, and that means - use virtual reality. The need to do laboratory experiments brings even more demands to an effective distant teaching-and-leaning technology (far more advanced than primitive interactive videos, e.g. https://www.pivotinteractives.com/).

To my best knowledge, there is no company or a startup trying to develop such technology. 

 

Hence, distant teaching sucks, and will continue to suck for years ahead. Unless someone want to change it by developing a platform specifically for teaching.

Dr. Valentin Voroshilov 

My two cents in the discussion about virtual education (an excerpt from The Confession Of The Creative Brain).

 

I wrote a lot about education, including the distant education. 

 

For example, check

The future of education is impossible without a robust online component.

I want you to know what I did last summer!

Getting ready for the fall semester?  Here are some hints.

 

The difference between online learning and online teaching.

 

More on this page.

No teaching technology can do any good if a teacher who uses it sucks.

Why Do People Have To Work? (part II)

Cont. from https://www.cognisity.how/2020/04/WhyWork.html

I ended the first part of my explanation with these statements:

 

“In order to make a living one has to be able to satisfy someone else’s needs for – well, something, anything: cooking, delivering food, writing a code, etc.

 

If one cannot do anything – one does not deserve to live.

 

If no one needs anything from you - you are worthless.

If someone can be useful to one but a very rich person, or to poor but many persons, that someone climbs up the social ladder.

 

Otherwise, ...”

 

It is time to finish the last statement.

 

If you are useful to one but a very rich person, or to poor but many persons, then you will climb the social ladder. Otherwise, you will die in poverty.

 

This is just the current state of affairs.

 

This is the current social and economic rule.

 

There is one exception from this rule – a person who was born rich, who got sufficient inheritance and was smart enough not to waist it. But that’s that.

 

For everyone else, the rule says: “If you are useful to one but a very rich person, or to poor but many persons, then you will climb the social ladder. Otherwise, you will die in poverty.”.

 

In order to have a good living you need to be needed by people whose combined wealth is large enough to pay you good money.

 

Now we can ask two questions:

 

1. Is this fair?

 

and

 

2. Can we live by a different rule?

 

The answer to the first question depends on a personal history of cultural growth and developed life philosophy. But if we all would follow an idea that all people are created equal, we would have to state that the rule is not fair. As I described in part I, we are who we are and what we are and where we are mostly due to a vast set of random factors. Because of that not all people are created equal. Socially and economically disadvantaged people cannot be blamed for being  disadvantaged, it’s not their fault. And hence there is no ideological or philosophical reason to punish those people by keeping them in poverty. The only reason for keeping huge part of a human population in poverty is, well, was, not enough resources to provide everyone with good living. But with the current technological advances that time is in the past. Nowadays, the humanity has resources to feed and give home to everyone – if only those resource would have been used.

 

There are political forces that do not want share available resource to all people because as long as they control those resources they control those people. But that is a different conversation.

 

If one believes that the current economic and social state of affairs I not fair, one needs to answer “Yes” to the second question.

 

“Yes We Can!” live by a different rule.

 

But – what rule would that be?

 

This is my version of the new rule, it has three parts:

 

1. All people have the same right for having a decent life.

2. The purpose of a government, the mission of a government is to establish political conditions that would lead to establishing fair economic conditions that would lead to establishing decent standards of living for all citizens.

3. The number one criterion of the quality of governmental work is how many citizens live in decent conditions that provide healthy and emotionally positive (a.k.a. happy) life.

 

Well, technically, “healthy” includes “mentally healthy”, i.e. “happy”, but I think that “happiness” still should be explicitly stated as the part of the measure of the work of a government.

 

If we accept this new rule, then we have to make a conclusion, that, in general, in order to have a healthy and happy life people should not be required to work.

 

The rule does NOT have such a requirement as a requirement to work.

 

That means, that under the new rule, people do NOT have to work!

 

Why do people have to work NOW? => Because otherwise they will die from starvation, or will have a very bad, unhealthy/unhappy life.

 

But if the government takes care of good living conditions for everyone, then people do NOT have to work anymore.

 

Pure logic.

 

BTW: this logic is not new in anyway (I don’t want to pretend I am the first who said it).

 

And, of course, it has been heavily criticized.

 

The #1 counter argument is – if people do not have to work, then they will not work, and then since no one will work, the whole economy will collapse, and the society will fall into chaos.

 

Every argument is based on some assumptions.

 

The #1 counter argument is based on the assumption that all humans are intrinsically lazy.

 

Ask some big-fish CEO or an entrepreneur why dose he/she work? “I don’t work because I want money, I work because I love creating new things, products, practices, connections, …” –  you name it. And he/she always thinks “because I am so so special! But everyone else is lazy ignorant people who are lucky to have a job.”

 

Of course, as we know now, there is nothing special about any of those big-fish rich and famous – he/she is just lucky, and everyone else is just not so lucky (re-read part I).

 

I do not believe that humans are intrinsically lazy.

 

I have been teaching for decades and have taught thousands of people of different age, gender, profession, culture. And I know that people are not lazy, there is no natural tendency for laziness, and if someone does not want to act, it is not because someone is lazy, but because he or she has no motive to act.

 

Most people (parents, teachers, bosses, politicians, administrators, friends, psychologists) confuse laziness with the lack of motivation.

 

Intrinsically, by nature, most people are prompted to act – just look at infants, look at toddlers. However, if born and grew up in a wrong culture (bad luck) some people do not have developed internal motives to grow – as a person, as a professional. That is not their fault. And there are many examples that when placed in a right culture, people start thriving (Anton Makarenko).

 

Hence, the most important parameter that affects who people act (hence work) is the culture they grew up in.

 

The lack of motivation is the sign of the wrong culture one grew up in.

 

It’s not about people, per se, it is about culture they grow up in.

 

With the right culture, all people would definitely have internal motivation to grow – as a person and as a professional.

 

With the right culture, all people would work even if they did not have to.

 

The answer to question “why do people have to work?” is “because many of them grew up in a wrong culture”.

 

Change the culture – and even if all people will have a good decent life without need for work, they will work – to realize/fulfill their natural intrinsic potential – because that feels really good (if you know what I mean – I do).

 

Now we have to answer two more questions:

 

1. What is the right culture?

 

and

 

2. How should the right culture be developed?

 

The answer to the first question begs a new publication.

 

The answer to the second question though is “trivial” – the right culture should be developed via right public education.

 

That, of course, moves us to questions like “what is wrong with the current public education?”, “why the dismal state of public education has been there for decades without any significant improvement despite billions of dollars spent on a so-called education reform?”, and other addressed in multiple posts on the matters.

 

Homework: why humans are intrinsically naturally active, not lazy?

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Because otherwise humans would die out long time ago, there would be no humanity, because there is no survival without being active, survival and especially procreation demands activity. 

 

Dr. Valentin Voroshilov

Jeff Bezos v. Education

On June 15 2017 Jeff Bezos twitted his request for ideas:

 

(https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/what-should-i-do-with-my-billions-jeff-bezos-asks-twitter-users-1.3122103

or

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-22/amazon-s-bezos-disrupts-another-frontier-with-just-one-tweet

or

https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/875418348598603776).

 

 

I quickly sent my response: http://gomars.xyz/jb.html

 

I offered several project - all in education (the projects offered there later were migrated to my main blog: www.Cognisity.How).

 

One project was designated specifically to opening a school – a special kind of school: http://www.teachology.xyz/chs.htm.

 

Fearing that Mr. Bezos does not have time to read, some time later, on may 12. 2018, I made a short video: https://youtu.be/_uMIk7MN4ME

 

Of course, I never had any feedback from Mr. Bezos, or his associates.

 

But on September 23, 2020, the press reported that Mr. Bezos finally turned his head toward education - he opened a pre-school: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/23/business/jeff-bezos-tuition-free-preschool-bezos-academy/index.html.

 

 

That is yet way far away from what he could have done, but it is the step in the right direction – a small step for a man, but a reeeeeally small step for the richest guy on the planet.

 

BTW, Mr. Bezos, all my projects remain heavily actual/current/present/contemporary – in case you are interested in making real difference in education.

Other oligarchs are also welcome:

 

Dr. Valentin Voroshilov

 

P.S. another post about Bezos – not related to education: http://www.cognisity.how/2018/05/JBezos.html

 P.P.S. My hope is that Jeff Bezos may be expecting one more child, and he wants to follow his/her steps through the years of schooling. If that is a case, at the minimum he would collect - eventually - some useful data on learning and teaching.

Two examples of linguistic analysis.

Two examples of professional linguistic analysis.

This post has two parts:

Part I: The meaning of “master”, “professional”, and “expert”.

Part II: What is “chaos” in a social setting (and why it happens on the first day of a class).

_______

Part I: The meaning of “master”, “professional”, and “expert”.

People often use the same words, but imply different meanings. “You told me that …”. “Yes, but, this is what I meant!”.

People believe that the sentence they say has only one meaning – the one they imply in it – but in reality, very often that sentence may have other interpretations. Misunderstanding happens when another person who listen to the sentence perceive its another interpretation. However, that person often does not realize that his/her interpretation is only an interpretation, and believes that his/her interpretation represents the only possible meaning of the sentence, hence believes that what he/she perceives is equal to what the author of the sentence means. In the end, two people (an author and a receiver/listener) assign different meanings to the same sentence, and when they argue, the argue about different things.

When a word or a sentence has a  different meaning or interpretation, then we have a case of ambiguity.

Ambiguity is a common reason for misunderstanding.

Clarity is the opposite of the ambiguity.

Clarity becomes with separation of different meanings that used to be used for the same word/term assigning those meanings to different words/terms.

This procedure has a name – a definition. We define the meaning of a word by assigning to that word one specific meaning.

Of course, that is not always possible, but definitions are the fundamental basis for a scientific language.

Science cannot have any ambiguity.

As an example of this approach let us assign specific meaning to three different terms: a master, a professional and an expert.

If you do a simple internet search, this is what you find.

What we immediately notice is that the descriptions do not place the terms in one linguistic domain. However, in our professional life, we use all these terms as a description of a person who has specific work-related responsibilities.

That means, first we need to define a domain where these words would have to be used with their specific meaning, and then we need to assign that meaning.

Let us narrow the domain to professional qualification evaluation.

We will use these terms do describe a person form the point of the quality of view of his/her work.

This is my view and my proposition for assigning specific meanings to terms “master”, “professional”, and “expert”.

The roots of mastership are in the sense of decency.

A master stems from a decent person.

But in this case decency is not understood like a moral prerogative, i.e. to be a good person.

Here, in the field of professional qualification evaluation, decency is understood in a sense of  - an intention to do the right thing.

Sometimes the right thing to do may feel moral for one person but immoral for other people.

Maybe there is a better word for a person who always tries to do the right thing, but I do not know that term.

By stating that “decency is an intention to do the right thing” we define the meaning of this term in the field of

And then we start describing the meaning of term “master” by stating that master bust be decent.

If a person does not have decency (when we talk about professional qualification evaluation), it means the person cannot be called a master.

But not every decent person is a master.

 Being decent is only the first component of being a master.

It is not enough just to want to do the right thing.

One also has to know what the right thing is (that implies understanding of why that is the right thing to do) and how to do it (that implies an ability to perform the required actions).

These two components represent an expert and a professional.

And expert is the one who knows what is right to do, and a professional knows how to do it. But an expert or a professional may not always want to do the right thing.

Now, after we defined “expert” and “professional” we can define “master”.  

A master is a decent expert and professional.

A master knows what is the right thing to do, knows how to do it, and wants to do it.

When a master encounters something wrong, he/she wants to fix it, to make it right, and also has abilities (knowledge and skills) to do it.

A specific approach to professional evaluation and development of teachers, called “Professional Designing”, is described in this publication: “Professional Designing For Teachers”.

Part II: What is “chaos” in a social setting.

Recently I came across an email where a faculty says: “I always expect that the first day of the class will be very chaotic”.

There are two major sources for this type of chaos.

The number one source of chaos is students who do not follow instructions.

  

In a social system, chaos is a presence of many unexpected events.

Of course, some unexpected events could be due to spontaneous change in the environment, like a natural or technological disaster.

But no one expects an earthquake or a tsunami on the first day of classes.

Hence, the actual unexpected events are the ones initiated by humans.

That means humans – students – will act unpredictably, unexpectedly, not according to the expectations of an instructor.

If all students would have been acting according to the expectations of an instructor, there would be no chaos.

But why don’t students act according to the expectations of an instructor?

Do they do it on purpose?

Or they are incapable of acting like they are supposed to?

Or those expectations are unrealistic?

In my experience, the majority of students want to do the most to succeed, and that includes following instructions. In most of the cases, the main reason for student not actin according to the expectations of an instructor is that those expectations are not articulated in a clear form.

In simple words, the most common source of chaos is insufficient instructions.

Chaos happens when an instructor did not provide students with exact and accurate instructions of what, when and how to do.

This is called bad planning.

Bad planning leads to chaos.

The events of the first day of a class heavily depends on the quality of planning on the part of the instructor.

Planning is a skill and can be trained, improved, developed.

A specific approach to professional evaluation and development of teachers, including planning, is described in this publication: “Professional Designing For Teachers”.

Sincerely,

Dr. Valentin Voroshilov

I want you to know what I did last summer!

This post has 2 parts:

Part I: at the end of this part you find the link to shared developed materials, including online labs.

Part II: the description of the technological means for teaching.

_________________

Part I:

Well, technically, it is still this summer.

I taught two remote courses – my first fully remote, fully off-site, 100 % internet based, distant courses.

They were not online courses, they were remote courses with the elements of online one. The differences is described here, but the main idea is simple,

a remote course is a course with the ultimate goal to give students learning experience “the same”

(meaning – as close as technically possible) to a regular on-site course.

I used to include online components in my regular courses, so it was not something absolutely new – except labs!

Online Physics Experiments: two semesters

(click here the full description, lab manuals, and lecture materials of the regular courses)

Of course, I had to develop a brand new strategy for teaching physics labs for a 100 % remote physics course.

My first intention was doing labs live; an example is semester 1, lab2

(there was no lab 1, the title was reserved for an FCI survey).

And this is how I did my very first lab – live.

It did not go well, for many reasons, one of which was that students had a hard time to watching me and follow my instructions – too intense. Plus, of course, at the very beginning of the lab my tech failed and I had to spend 20 minutes on fixing it, while more than hundred student were waiting (in the first semester I created one huge lab section for 90 % of students and another small one for students who could not attend the first one; in the second semester I broke the class into ten small lab sections).

So, I’ve changed the approach.

All other labs were pre-prepared (pun intended), and students did those labs in groups under the guidance of the TFs (via Zoom).

The results were good (at least according to some students).

The same lab experiments could be used as parts of lectures.

I decided to share all the materials – videos, instructions files, lab files, and software I used (at the time – free for students).

During the lab students had to work in groups of 4 completing a  shared file, and also entering their answers into an online system (I used WebAssign – easy to grade).

I tested different software

but ended up using only Zoom, Tracker, LoggerPro and Screen Recorder (you can find instructions in the shared folder – the link is below).

I did not have a team, no sound managers, no editors, etc., and naturally that affected the quality of the videos.

I wish I had more time and more sources – in that case I could develop all those (and more) labs in a solid product (interested in cooperation? check this link!).

Without further ado, this is the link to the share folder – probably, you need to have google account to access the folder, but maybe not.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1JXYPPEO5xXGO2twXi8T4j3SIpxi59puR?usp=sharing

This is what I see when I follow the link to the folder: some instructions files and then two folders – one per each semester (you should see something similar).

You can download any file or folder.

However, I have to say upfront that my labs are intense and force students into a lot of thinking. For example, you can take a look at my first lab for the second semester, and this online lab I came across some time ago (also the first lab for the second semester; in the lab file I also placed some notes to pinpoint some issues I found in the lab). On the other hand, some of my labs have found its way to the wider audience. For example, since 2012 I was using this lab in my Summer II course. And recently I found that my manual was used - verbatim! - as an online lab for Pivot Interactives. It's nice to know that other instructors appreciate my material. But it would also be nice to be noted - as the author.
_________
If you are looking for experiments that could be used as a demonstration, you can check theses resources.

1) Descriptions of common physics demonstrations:

http://physics.bu.edu/demos/

Links to videos:

2) About 150 videos; most show a specific experiment named in the title

https://www.youtube.com/user/buphysics/videos

3) About 400 videos, about 150 of them are lectures, but about 90 % of those lectures also show demonstrations.

https://www.youtube.com/user/vvfreephysics/videos

Sorry, there are no catalogs for the videos, and when browsing, you can also stumble upon something not related to physics.

Please feel free to leave comments (at the bottom of this page).

Sincerely,

Dr. Valentin Voroshilov

Please feel free to contact me if you need a consultation.

Part II: Some notes on course organization.

All lectures were live using live streaming tech ECHO360, and at the same time all lectures were recorded. As a backup, I always had with me a second PC system with Zoom. On several occasions mine main system failed, and I had to use a backup system, and I had to deal with IT, but that story would take much more space than one web-page.

Students could choose to watch live or a recording. In any case they were required to asnwer my lecture questions using WebAssign (so far it was the cheapest solution – around $60 for two semesters). 

My students would have to pay only for the WebAssign access. They didn't have to buy a text book because for many years I’ve been using a free online textbook from OpenStax. It's not perfect, but sufficient enough (since physics has not changed much for about a hundred years any textbook would do fine). Plus, I always try to develop my lectures in such a way that students would not really need a textbook at all. I used free versions of software, and instead of using other platforms (like FlipIt or Pivot) I was developing my own materials.

All homework was also delivered via WebAssign. 

Office hours were done via Zoom, and for a day-to-day communication we used Piazza. 

I used a touchscreen monitor for writing on the top of my slides and then uploaded the slides for students. 

When I did a demonstration experiment, I would switch to Zoom and used my web camera to project experiences. In order to see what students see I used a tablet to join the meeting as a student, and also I was watching myself via ECHO360. 

The tech was very cumbersome, switching between different tech modes took extra time and effort. When one uses only a PowerPoint presentation, then all attention can be focused on the content. But – trying to achieve the best view for students – I had to pay attention to multiple actions, switching  between different modes and devises, and that wasn't easy – teaching a remote course requires from a teacher additional skills. And, of course, regular switching of the focus between the content and the tech has led to more mistakes in the content (more things like a missing coefficient, etc.).

This also demonstrates a simple fact - if you want to deliver good distance education you need to invest in it, you need to invest in technologies, and then you need to train people how to use those technologies (that also requires serious investments).

 

I also experimented with teaching from home.

Anyone, everyone on this planet gets bored really really quickly watching a PowerPoint presentation for more than ten minutes without seeing a lecturer – only slides (with a lecturer it’s twenty).

But I don't have at home a projector and a screen or a wall-sized TV set to stand in front of them while broadcasting my lecture (I’m not that rich).

Hence, I had to find a way to project my slides and myself at the same time.

Zoom allows that using a screen sharing option.

In the end, to provide students with the best learning experience, I've built this remote teaching station.

 But my laptop was not powerful enough, and I needed more fast USB ports, so I made an upgrade.

When performing a live lecture with this setup, I used a touchscreen monitor to write on a top of my slides (to post them after a lecture).

One camera faced me and the second camera faced the table which I used for some small demonstrations. When I need to do a demonstration, I didn't have to move my camera manually, I can't just switch from one camera to another and then switch back.

The second monitor I used for Zoom and other windows. And I used another computer to see what students would see.

Technically, the second monitor does not have to be a touchscreen, but using a pen saves time (instead of moving a mouse cursor between two screens).

  

In the summer, when I was teaching from the campus, I was also broadcasting my lectures using a Periscope (I also used those recordings as backup recordings when ECHO360 system failed – twice).

But at home, without a screen behind me Periscope broadcasting was useless.

If you record your Zoom meeting with a shared screen, then stopping sharing and pausing sharing affect your video in different ways – you can play with settings and find the one you like more. I use the settings when students can see in one video both views at the same time – the slides and me.

But I wish Zoom would develop the third mode: freeze sharing.

For meeting participants freeze sharing mode would act like pause sharing mode, but in the recorded video it would act like stop sharing mode.

It would be also cool if Zoom would add to the annotation panel some tools, like a ruler and a protractor.

Unfortunately, there is no company that would create an integrated tech solution for remote science courses.

In the end, the tech part was doable and effective enough.

I do not expect many online teachers would have students saying: 

“Demonstrations are also entertaining and help for visual learners with difficult concepts. ”

“Good use of demonstrations.”

“Does a lot of visual demonstrations.”

More from student evaluations, and also links leading to the actual files (with everything negative students tell about me) is on this page.

P.P.S. my blog https://www.cognisity.how/

Sincerely,

Dr. Valentin Voroshilov

Please feel free to contact me if you need a consultation.

P.P.P.S.
Some examples of Zoom lecturing I came across in the past (including some of mine) 

A presentation with a “laser pointer”

A presentation with notes over slides

 A presentation with notes over slides and a view of the lecturer

A presentation with notes over slides, a view of the lecturer, some communication and an experiment