Improving your streaming game

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After my first on-line lecture I have got some interesting feedback from my students and from my own experience too. While it felt odd during the first few minutes, the fact I saw many of my students were there and that setup mostly worked made me relax a bit more during the second half of the class.

But, first of all, let me tell you what worked well and what did not:

  1. Asking the students to post a comment for attendance record worked extremely well in my opinion. As it allowed me to put faces to the online viewers counter, while it also reassured me my students were ready, which also relaxed me as I was worried they might not show up.
  2. Comments allowed students to report audio trouble when it happened and me fixing it quickly. 
  3. Of course, comments also allowed students to raise questions about the topics I was talking about, which make the lecture a bit more interactive and, hopefully, useful and entertaining.
  4. I found myself at times uneasy as I have not a pointer to signal on the slides any specific area students should need to focus on. I tried to compensate for that with my speech but this is definitely something to fix for the next lecture.
  5. While I greeted students with me on my webcam, I was quickly switching to the blackboard screen or the slides. And when I did that I did not keep a stamp size image of me on the streamed view.
  6. I felt the need of drawing some lines over the PDF slides I was using, but the image viewer software I was using was somehow limited, so  I ended up with some poor traces that took me longer than expected and distract my attention from my speech. Something to improve upon too.
  7. I was using an iPad using Procreate drawing program to simulate a blackboard but it did not occur to me the iPad would go to sleep and then I will lose the connection. Next time I will configure the iPad not to go to sleep to prevent that.

Improvements for the next lectures

I was just rushed using OBS Studio on my iMac so I was not aware that, for example, the system pointer is not shown when it moves over a window that has been captured by OBS. And that seems to be a limitation of MacOS according to this thread. However, it is possible to use Display Capture (instead of Window Capture) to grab the whole screen. That seems not a good idea as you are indeed capturing your whole display, including the OBS Studio instance. However, you can crop the capture to, for example, cover a given window as in the image below:


This way, what is captured is only what is contained in that area of the display, including the system pointer if you select so. So now you can use your pointer and it will be seen in the stream. Please note that if at any given time you overlap another window over that area it will be shown too. So we have got back our pointer! An added benefit of this capture is that any context menu or dialog box will also be shown (at least the part of it that overlaps with the crop window).


Another student mentioned that it would be better if I kept my webcam on at all times, maybe reduced in size not to block the slides or the blackboard. That is easy to fix as moving and resizing the webcam capture in OBS is very easy to do. Plus it seems students find better to have a human talking, even small in size, over a not so inviting slide, than just the bare slide with only a voice in the background. I think they are right.

I am hesitant about what could work best: Keeping the presentation PDF on the iMac or moving it to the iPad? The logic for moving it to the iPad was that the iBooks app could present the PDF nicely while I could easily draw on top of any slide and, while the iPad does not have a pointer, I later learned that I could show one using a Bluetooth mouse and the Accessibility menu. The second part of this reasoning was that having both the blackboard and the slides on the iPad will make it the main device I would be working with, so it won't go to sleep. But that last reason is flawed as I may need to go back to the iMac for doing some demonstration using so software. 

The best way for the iPad not to go to sleep is to disable that in the system settings. Still, it seems more appealing to use the Apple Pencil to draw over the slides than the mouse at the computer so I guess this is the way I will do it next time.

But now that I have learned how to show the pointer over something, I might keep the slides on the iMac too, and overlap its window over the other application I want to show and just minimize when I do not want it to be shown. It is a different approach than having OBS to do the switch but it works for me too. 

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