...also: is my institution the only one using WebEx? Everyone is Zoom Zoom Zoom. It's like a Mazda ad.
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Online Educators...
- Thread starter pdxKingsFan
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Löwenherz
Starter
I was just thinking that myself. My district is actually forbidding Zoom. We're exclusive to Google Hangout.
My son just did a hangout with his class but I think his school uses Zoom as well. This is the first "school day" I have had him. I've been given conflicting FERPA information about all of these services. With any luck none of that will bite us during this thing.
Not to go too much on a tangent - we've thought about FERPA: our lawyers think we're good. We're not posting any images or videos online; all recordings are stored via our secure learning management system. Google G.Suite and Zoom are both FERPA compliant, FWIW.
...Also, we've been using WebEx at USC in the Engineering school for 10 years+ so we've stuck to it even though the rest of the school has jumped on the Zoom bandwagon. We're manually starting and recording 30-50 classes a day on WebEx right now. My department handles the Off-Campus students normally so we're supporting the live lectures and also recording, editing, and posting the classes to our LMS page. And we have 60 student workers logging in remotely too to monitor the classes and assist the professors. It was all a little nuts last week but everyone seems to be picking it up and getting used to it now. Our on-campus network seems to be buckling under the pressure though.
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maybe we should have an online educators thread. I'm working on getting telehealth simulations going but I guess today could have been a little more productive. that's ok because I have to do a bunch of linked in learning tonight when the house goes quiet.
*mods could you copy/move the relevant portions and help us get that going if others want?
*mods could you copy/move the relevant portions and help us get that going if others want?
I was able to get 50+ actors of varying skills onto a meeting Friday to introduce some new staff and prep/discuss the possible future of online casework. I was maybe expecting about half that to be able to do it reliably. It's good to have so many options, and I'm stoked that I might be able to get some of these folks some work. But I'm *REALLY* hoping we are able to have in person encounters by sometime in May. Seems like 3-4 other area schools are also doing similar and I'm on a faculty listserv and everyone is asking about it. I had presented about telehealth simulations a few years back at one of our largest conferences and it was fairly well attended and a bit out of my wheelhouse, so it's funny that I am somehow becoming more and more expert at this because I often feel like my career is on cruise control.
We've run them for groups of 12-14 students with tech support available but we're looking at a group with >160 learners that had 3 dates scheduled in April.
On the bright side, the last time I supported online education full time we were using Adobe Connect, had horrible audio connections, and frequently needed to run everything over a landline because otherwise we'd waste class time troubleshooting. We are in a different world from that with Zoom and WebEx.
The other sort of bright side to this is because I'm able to coordinate this project I am able to avoid going into the office. It's far enough from the hospital to not stress about but all things being equal I am happy to stay home.
--- ok question:
Do you have much experience with breakout sessions or waiting rooms?
Mine too, but the public schools here have been slow to adopt and it has caused quite a fuss.
Hoovtrain
All-Star
nice. Yeah his teacher has been communicating with the parents and giving us stuff to work on with them and some lesson plans, which I thought was nice. we are also trying to work on his homework (stuff like math/spelling workbooks, sight words, etc) everyday, just tough when having to work. The Zoom was not the total crap show I was expecting with a bunch of 5 year old lol
We don't use Breakout Sessions very often -- in a typical semester maybe 2 of the Professors will ask to use them for their classes so we set up their WebEx meetings in Training Center instead of Meeting Center. I have run those meetings before though.... Once everyone joins the meeting as a participant, the moderator can sort them individually into separate groups. Then when you decide to start the Breakout Session it just disconnects everyone from the main meeting (the hub of the wheel so to speak) and moves them virtually into their own "mini meeting" where they can share content and speak only to the other people in their group. Then when you end it, everyone is back in one meeting again. You also have the option of manually sorting the participants or having WebEx randomly sort them for you.
I can try to answer more specific questions though. Are you asking hypothetically or do you already know what you would like to use them for?
The frustrating thing with WebEx is that Cisco is constantly tweaking things and pushing through updates that break parts of our operations. Then my boss will have a 3 or 4 hour phone conversation explaining to them how we're using the software and why we need them to give us back whatever feature they took away. To their credit they usually work with us and make that happen but it does often feel like we're chasing our own tail. It's also pretty confusing because they offer 3 different versions: Meeting Center, Event Center, and Training Center and they all behave differently! We have to train student workers too and this past semester the training video was already obsolete before the semester even started.
I do remember Adobe Connect though! It was awful! We collaborated on a project with Google India some 15 years ago where they had Elementary school teachers in LA come in to our classroom and teach kids in Dharamshala remotely. The goal of the project was to develop their own software platform called Guru but initially we were using Adobe Connect and the amount of hoops we had to jump through to get it remotely functional was pretty aggravating. There were also logistical problems with the time zone difference and our teachers were volunteers and still had their regular classes to run so my colleague and I found ourselves building lesson plans on the fly for 5th graders which, needless to say, is not our area of expertise!
So let's say we have to do 160 students with 20 actors, I think we would have the 20 come into a room and debrief with faculty, then move them into a room with one of our actors portraying their patient. And then at some point we'd rinse and repeat. Maybe we can only do x instead of 20, but that's essentially the in-person flow I may be trying to replicate.
This would be a lot easier than trying to set up 20 rooms and control in and out times.
I've not seen anything about the 3 different centers, but I will look at our institution's documentation on those 3 versions.
One other not-hypothetical - is there any way to change your screen name after you sign in? Zoom has this.
His session today was at 1pm I looked up at the clock and it was 1:15 and I had a freakout only to find he was all logged in and going. The kids are really good at this, and when he's not doing his school work he's often playing fortnite with his classmates (much to my partner's dismay but from what I can find most parents accept we have to let the kids fun when they aren't working right now).
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. It all sounds theoretically possible but it will be a little bit challenging logistically. Let me see if I can walk through how it would work in WebEx.
You would schedule one session for everyone. Here's what the options look like for scheduling Breakout Sessions in WebEx Training Center:
Since you're dealing with 160 students, another 20 actors, and faculty it seems like getting this set-up ahead of time would save you a lot of trouble on the actual day. For the auto-sorting you just put in how many rooms you want or how many people you want in each room. There's also a line here which is easy to overlook but is actually quite critical: Breakout Sessions won't work correctly for anyone who uses the WebEx app on either a phone or a tablet. You really have to make sure they know ahead of time that they need to be logging in on some kind of laptop or desktop computer.
If you know how you want to set up the room assignments before the scheduled day you can also enable registration and have the room assignments set up ahead of time. That's the last option where you can assign them by name into a particular room.
Here's what the option panel looks like in the meeting:
So your third option (the first two being auto-sorting or manually pre-sorting them by name) is to assign them within the meeting itself. You create your rooms on the right and then drag the names of attendees into them. Whichever option you choose, you also get to select the default presenter. This is the person who will be able to share their screen and also end the session and return everybody back to the main meeting room.
On the day of the meeting, when everyone joins the meeting they all get put into the same session initially. You can use this to give them some general instructions. This could also be where the faculty debriefs them on the assignment before they go to their separate room to talk to the actor. Then when you click the Start button, it will sort them into their assigned rooms. The presenter in each session would be the "patient". If you want to give everyone the same amount of time, as the moderator you can click a button which will notify to all breakout session presenters that you have requested they end their sessions. When the time is up, those presenters will then end the session which returns everybody back to the main room.
If you have 160 students total and want to have about 20 in each room you should be able to have them all happen simultaneously. That divides into 8 rooms though and you said you have 20 actors . Or maybe you meant 20 students per actor? The complicating factor would be if you want to have the faculty debrief each group individually. Then you would need to assign a faculty member to each session along with your group of 20 students and your actor. The faculty could pass control to the actor once they've given their instructions and they'll be able to end the session when time is up also.
Hopefully that makes sense. We don't have any training videos for how to use this but I did a quick search and found a pretty good one from NYU:
Not all of this is relevant. You wouldn't be allowing the students to join sessions without permission, for instance, but it's helpful to see what the interface looks like. I also realize as I'm typing this out that you will need to be manually assigning people into rooms in order to make sure there's one actor per room. I'd recommend enabling registration in that case so you can get that all planned out ahead of time.
As you get further along in the planning, I'd be happy to join a training session with you at some point and see if we can talk through a dry-run scenario. Let me know! And regarding your last question, it's rather stupid but no you can't change your name in WebEx once you've joined the meeting. You would have to log out and then log in again under a different name. Not sure why that is, but that's just how WebEx rolls. We've been getting that question a lot over the last 2 weeks though.
One of the funny things is how wonky the timeline during this thing is. Stuff that takes months to do all the sudden we can just go. And stuff that seems like it is a literal matter of life and death is a "whenever".
We spent the morning drafting a charter for our tele-sim initiatives and picked some dates on the calendar that haven't been officially cancelled yet as possible starts, expecting to have to clear a ton of red-tape, curricula development, etc. We were told nothing not directly COVID related would be approved and the cases we have ready to go are not. First question is looks great but why can't we do it sooner? ha! We've got tons of people champing at the bit to work so if the red tape is clear we're ready.
While that was ongoing, I was emailing back and forth some folks who shot video for a training video on PPEs during code scenarios at the hospital. I asked if I could send them a first edit in the morning after I went down to the studio tonight to record voice overs. Thinking that maybe this needed to get out yesterday I also offered to work more tonight to get something final out tomorrow.
"oh, next week would be great". I plan to have it done by Friday. Come on!
I've been thinking since I built out a small studio space in a closet in my basement that it would be pretty cool to start doing voice work as a side gig that I could possibly spin into retirement income down the road since a big part of my day to day is delivering overhead announcements to keep the exams running. Staring at a big script to read tonight I am a little less psyched about this. But it will make a good demo along with one other project I have lined up if I do decide to go through with it.
We spent the morning drafting a charter for our tele-sim initiatives and picked some dates on the calendar that haven't been officially cancelled yet as possible starts, expecting to have to clear a ton of red-tape, curricula development, etc. We were told nothing not directly COVID related would be approved and the cases we have ready to go are not. First question is looks great but why can't we do it sooner? ha! We've got tons of people champing at the bit to work so if the red tape is clear we're ready.
While that was ongoing, I was emailing back and forth some folks who shot video for a training video on PPEs during code scenarios at the hospital. I asked if I could send them a first edit in the morning after I went down to the studio tonight to record voice overs. Thinking that maybe this needed to get out yesterday I also offered to work more tonight to get something final out tomorrow.
"oh, next week would be great". I plan to have it done by Friday. Come on!
I've been thinking since I built out a small studio space in a closet in my basement that it would be pretty cool to start doing voice work as a side gig that I could possibly spin into retirement income down the road since a big part of my day to day is delivering overhead announcements to keep the exams running. Staring at a big script to read tonight I am a little less psyched about this. But it will make a good demo along with one other project I have lined up if I do decide to go through with it.
Hey @hrdboild - I've been cruising along using WebEx Meeting and finally started exploring WebEx Training (not sure why, but I assumed I didn't have access to it but found it today while testing). I can't seem to see video cameras in the breakout rooms. Are they disabled in breakouts? Or am I missing a setting?
It's possible that there's a setting somewhere that will enable video in breakout sessions. Now that I think about it, when we've used the breakout sessions the students were just using the audio conference. Most of our students don't enable their cameras unless they're giving a presentation. I can see how that would be a deal breaker for your purposes though. I'll log into our account and see if I can find that option anywhere.
We've been really slow rolling but are finally doing a dry run tomorrow for a nursing simulation we'll be running in May. The med school has cancelled all clinical rotations for the entire spring term because PPE is at such a premium so that killed a lot of our opportunity to run these earlier.
With a smaller group (20 something students) we're going to just run 4 meeting rooms and a 5th as a lobby where I will give them their case info and then send them to their virtual encounter. But it would be great to use the Training product instead if it supported video and recording the breakouts (I think it does neither).
After dozens of meetings it's nice to be inching close to actually doing the fun part of my job again. Even in modified format. I did actually produce and edit a training video for code cases which was pretty scary just in terms of the limited amount of treatment options that are possible due to protection precautions.
I don't see anything in the account settings or the Meeting Scheduling page that refers to attendee video but there's two options you can look at within the meeting itself. Go up to Participant > Assign Privileges and check the box that says "All Attendee Privileges"
You can also go up to Session > Session Options and make sure both of the video options are checked.
If you try both of those and you still don't get an option for attendees to enable video while in breakout sessions, you can try having them download an app that lets you preview your webcam on your desktop. There's a bunch of free options for Windows 10 computers on the Microsoft store. I think Apple has an app built in that does that on their laptops. The computer I'm using at the moment is still WIndows 7 so I downloaded this program (https://www.deskshare.com/ip-camera-viewer.aspx) and it works well enough.
That will allow your actors to share their screen and send video at least. We've actually found that sending video this way via the screen share utility in WebEx has worked better for our classes than the traditional way because WebEx cuts the frame rate or sometimes kills the video feed entirely if bandwidth drops and when you get a lot of users online at once (say 80 students in the same meeting using voice over ip for example) the bandwidth is often a problem.
You can also go up to Session > Session Options and make sure both of the video options are checked.
If you try both of those and you still don't get an option for attendees to enable video while in breakout sessions, you can try having them download an app that lets you preview your webcam on your desktop. There's a bunch of free options for Windows 10 computers on the Microsoft store. I think Apple has an app built in that does that on their laptops. The computer I'm using at the moment is still WIndows 7 so I downloaded this program (https://www.deskshare.com/ip-camera-viewer.aspx) and it works well enough.
That will allow your actors to share their screen and send video at least. We've actually found that sending video this way via the screen share utility in WebEx has worked better for our classes than the traditional way because WebEx cuts the frame rate or sometimes kills the video feed entirely if bandwidth drops and when you get a lot of users online at once (say 80 students in the same meeting using voice over ip for example) the bandwidth is often a problem.
Thanks will give it a shot in the morning.
After months of solid performance WebEx had about 40 mins of downtime in the middle of exams for our first year med students today. Really only screwed up about a dozen or so of them but I can only imagine being the WebEx techs today.
Oh man, that sucks! That's always the issue with technology: it's great when it works but it always seems to go down at the worst possible times doesn't it? I've got a lot of crazy stories from this semester but I'm almost too exhausted to remember much of anything at the moment. There was the morning that the whole North American WebEx server went down and we had to quickly move a dozen classes into new Zoom meetings. That was a good one. Or when we lost internet access in our classrooms for an hour and had to run all the meetings from our personal computers instead....
...Also we decided (or at least someone in our department decided) to use the new WebEx connector to link the meetings directly into Desire2Learn which is the platform we use for course management now for the Engineering school (most of USC is still on BlackBoard). Again, great in theory if it works. Unfortunately, what we didn't realize is that we would need an elaborate system of multiple Incognito tabs in order to create these meetings with our 17 different classroom accounts and then if we alter anything (the time, the end date, the password) the link becomes invalid and we have to do it again. If the schedule changes, we have to do it again. Oh and we can only delete these meetings from the class page by logging in to the exact same account which created them. So that's 6 D2L user accounts times 17 classroom accounts which is a lot of permutations to get right! And of course the entire schedule changed 2 days before the start of the semester because some of the professors still want to teach on campus even though there are no students in the room. It's amazing I still have any hair left!
WebEx has gotten exponentially better this year now that they have hundreds of thousands more Beta testers and Zoom pushing them for market share. Breakout rooms are finally integrated into the primary WebEx Meeting Center app, for instance, instead of being relegated to their outdated Training Center app. But they have an annoying habit of pushing out updates frequently with no warning which break our recording process and require us to troubleshoot and come up with new solutions on the fly. I'm grateful these platforms exist because we wouldn't have been able to run the entire school remotely without them but man, it sure does feel like they're actively working to make our lives more difficult sometimes!
...Also we decided (or at least someone in our department decided) to use the new WebEx connector to link the meetings directly into Desire2Learn which is the platform we use for course management now for the Engineering school (most of USC is still on BlackBoard). Again, great in theory if it works. Unfortunately, what we didn't realize is that we would need an elaborate system of multiple Incognito tabs in order to create these meetings with our 17 different classroom accounts and then if we alter anything (the time, the end date, the password) the link becomes invalid and we have to do it again. If the schedule changes, we have to do it again. Oh and we can only delete these meetings from the class page by logging in to the exact same account which created them. So that's 6 D2L user accounts times 17 classroom accounts which is a lot of permutations to get right! And of course the entire schedule changed 2 days before the start of the semester because some of the professors still want to teach on campus even though there are no students in the room. It's amazing I still have any hair left!
WebEx has gotten exponentially better this year now that they have hundreds of thousands more Beta testers and Zoom pushing them for market share. Breakout rooms are finally integrated into the primary WebEx Meeting Center app, for instance, instead of being relegated to their outdated Training Center app. But they have an annoying habit of pushing out updates frequently with no warning which break our recording process and require us to troubleshoot and come up with new solutions on the fly. I'm grateful these platforms exist because we wouldn't have been able to run the entire school remotely without them but man, it sure does feel like they're actively working to make our lives more difficult sometimes!
We are committed to delivering our winter term online but I scheduled my vaccination for Monday so the party may be coming to an end.
What state are you in? I’m waiting for the message for us teachers here in California
Oregon - but note that I work to educate Doctors, Nurses, PAs, Pharmacists and other future frontline providers who haven't been able to get their needed clinical hours in 10 months.
Update: got my first shot this morning. So far so good (it has been about 3 hours), I would describe it so far as easier than my last tetanus shot.
Humblebrag but I'm getting published (as a co-author) in the Journal of Nursing Education for my work.
