About online teaching

These days we have to be enclosed in our houses by the coronavirus (COVID-19), so in my University (in Granada) as the others in Spain, we had to became in online teaching expert in a weekend.

For the courses we have following different approaches: Additional written material, several short videos about the materials, or conferences for giving the courses by video-conferences. All options have its advantages and drawbacks. However, because I like the feedback with the students (for instance, to make several examples in code about the concepts in my programming course), I have finally decided to give the course by video-conference. For recommendation of my university I use google meet, used also for the other teachers in the course. Personally, I prefer Jitsi, not only it is open source, but it also it is comparable in features to the google option, it is a great option.

A part of the teaching by video-conference, I have put all the slides in the Moodle of the courses (actually, it was previously there), and I will try to put some Quiz to allow students to have a better feedback about their knowledge.

The main problem has been to have a deaf student. The video-conference is not good, and I have spent several days trying several tools to automatic caption the voice, but in Spanish too many tools do not give a good performance (they have a lot of errors), finally the best option was Ability Connect, a tool from University of Alicante (Spain) for that. Unfortunately, sometimes it freezes.

Some people should think that I will have less work, but actually the situation have put me more work in teaching. It is good to learn new skills, but it takes a lot of time.