Teaching on cloud nine
By: Enrique Dans
Tags: Google, Teaching, Ie University, Online Learning, Cloud Computing

IMAGE: Krzysztof-m — Pixabay (CC0)

Since the lockdown, when I moved all my classes online, I’ve seen a lot changes, some extremely obvious, others, less so. Like many of my colleagues at IE University, I’ve been teaching online on a regular basis since 2000 at an institution with a clear and successful online teaching strategy — although the vast majority of these classes were forums, an asynchronous format in which discussions were of better quality and depth compared to face-to-face sessions, but wouldn’t fit into a 90-minute slot, the usual duration of classes at an institution like IE University (actually, 80 minutes with a ten-minute break between sessions).

This meant that we opted for a video format, which we had already been using for a long time: this way, classes could continue to be held unchanged from the original planning given to students, and would fill 80 minutes. In addition, interaction was reasonably similar to a face-to-face class: we could see each other’s faces, interrupt, raise hands, divide the class into work groups, or using a presentation or other documents such as a spreadsheet.

That’s precisely where one of the changes that has caught my eye came: the transition to the cloud. Usually, in classes and conferences, I use Keynote for my presentations: I like the tool, I have been using it for a long time, and it’s easy to use and reasonably attractive. However, as I began my online classes after lockdown, I immediately realized that Keynotes’ features, the compositions, effects or transitions, when you played them on your screen and shared them, were either pixelated or just didn’t really work. The hierarchy of needs changed: the important thing now was that the presentation moved quickly and looked good, that it was functional, that contents were presented efficiently, rather than getting lost in aesthetics.

The answer? Worthy of Captain Obvious: make my presentations on Google Slides. Why? because with my presentation in the cloud, each participant can download it from the Google server rather than from my computer. This may sound obvious, but the difference is major. There are other options, such as Prezi or Slideshare but I was more familiar with Google Slides, which is very easy to use: in fact, it takes less than ten minutes to figure it out even if you haven’t used it before. And in addition, sharing a presentation directly from Google Slides is a direct, simple option and available in both Zoom and the development software that we use at IE University, the WoW Room: you enter the presentation link in the tool, and you’re good to go. In fact, Google recently introduced a similar integration between Google Classroom and Google Meet.

I also use a lot of video in my presentations. Doing so via screen sharing was a disaster: what students saw was frequently pixelated, the sound chopped, or simply poor quality. Again, the solution — in this case even more obvious, was to upload the video to the cloud, to YouTube or Vimeo and to share it from that platform, so that everything depended on the student’s connection, not mine. If their connection allows them to watch a video on YouTube, that’s enough for them to experience the class normally. Obvious, sure, but worth checking, otherwise, you’ll spend the class cursing the bandwidth gods, and you and your students will have a poor experience.

If you use your bandwidth to stream your own video while talking, which tends to be intensive in its use, you leave little available for the other resources you want to use. Putting them on the cloud, a simple solution, improves quality. Think about it. Everything you can take to the cloud is probably better off there than on your machine.

I just received my teacher survey from the first group who experienced the change, in the middle of their course, from face-to-face classes to online classes: a 4.86 out of 5, and numerous laudable comments. I couldn’t be happier. Here I am, after thirty years in the game, teaching on cloud nine … :-)