As colleges and universities are shutting down across the globe as a result of COVID-19, many people in academia are questioning how we are able to rise up to hurry and set up a steady workflow to get our podcasts, on-line lectures, and tutorials on the market for our college students.
Open supply software program (OSS) has a key function to play on this state of affairs for a lot of causes, together with:
- Speed: OSS can roll out rapidly and in massive numbers (e.g., to a military of educating assistants for a number of tutorial periods in huge lectures) with out licensing points and in a decentralized method.
- Cost: OSS doesn’t price something upfront, which is vital for financially stretched colleges and universities that want options to complicated challenges on very quick discover.
With every little thing logging on, we want new methods to interact with college students. Here is an inventory of instruments that I’ve discovered helpful to share my very own lectures.
Create podcasts, movies, or stay streams with OBS
Open Broadcast Studio (OBS) is an expert, open supply audio and video recording software that means that you can file, stream immediately, and do way more. OBS is out there for all main platforms (Windows, macOS, and Linux), so interoperability together with your colleagues and their numerous units is ensured.
Even in case you’re already utilizing on-line conferencing software program as a recording system, OBS generally is a nice backup answer. Since it information regionally, you are protected in opposition to any community lags or disconnections. You even have full management over your information, so many instructional establishments could discover it to be a safer answer than another choices.
Compatibility can also be a bonus: OBS shops recordings in an ordinary intermediate format (MKV), which could be transferred to MP4 or different codecs. Also, help for Nvidia graphics playing cards below OBS is nice, as the corporate is among the major sponsors of the OBS undertaking. This means that you can make full use of your hardware and pace up the recording course of.
Video and sound enhancing
After you file your podcast or video, you might discover that it wants enhancing. There are many causes you might must edit your audio or video. For instance, many college on-line platforms prohibit the scale of recordsdata you’ll be able to add, so you could have to chop lengthy movies. Or, the sound could also be too quiet, or perhaps it was too noisy once you recorded it, so it’s essential make changes to the audio.
Two of the open supply apps to discover are OpenShot and Shotcut. Of the 2, Shotcut is a extra superior program, which means a barely steeper studying curve. Both are cross-platform and have full help for hardware encoding with NVidia and different graphics playing cards, which is able to considerably decrease processing time in comparison with CPU-only processing.
You may also extract a soundtrack in both program (though I’ve discovered it to be a lot sooner with Shotcut) and export it to an audio-editing program. I discover Audacity, one other open supply, cross-platform (Mac, Linux, Windows) software, to work extraordinarily effectively.
My typical workflow appears to be like one thing like this:
- Import the recording into Shotcut
- Extract the audio, reserve it to an audio file
- Import it into Audacity, normalize and amplify the audio, perhaps do some noise discount
- Save the audio to a brand new file
- Import the brand new audio file into Shotcut, align it with the audio-free video, and reduce appropriately
- Export into an MP4 video (this final step normally takes a while, so have a espresso…)
Electronic blackboards
If you need to annotate your slides or develop concepts on an digital blackboard, you want note-taking software program and a tool with a touchscreen or a graphics pill. An excellent open supply software (developed with Swiss taxpayer funding) for blackboarding is OpenBoard. It is cross-platform; though it’s formally solely accessible for Linux on Ubuntu 16.04, you’ll be able to set up a Flatpak and it’ll work on any Linux taste. It is known as a good software; its solely shortcoming is that annotating slides just isn’t excellent.
My major open supply annotation and electrical blackboard software is Xournal++, which is out there in some Linux distros repos (e.g., Linux Mint) and in any other case through Flathub. Like all of the instruments talked about earlier, it’s also accessible on Mac and Windows. If you recognize of any open supply, cross-platform note-taking instruments, please share them within the feedback.
Built-in options have their limits
You would possibly marvel why you need to trouble with different recording software program within the first place. After all, most trendy working methods have built-in display screen recorders that will even seize audio. However, these built-in options have their limits. One key limitation is that you simply can not normally seize multiple video supply at a time (e.g., a webcam together with your speaking head and a set of slides plus a whiteboard from a graphics pill).
The skill to make use of a number of video sources could be very helpful, although, since it may be uninteresting for college students to simply take heed to your voice and see your slides for prolonged intervals. Face-to-face interactions—even when carried out just about—assist maintain listeners’ consideration and make it simpler for them to deal with imperfect recording high quality and background noise. In addition, most of the built-in instruments don’t mean you can seize chosen areas of the display screen, and basically, you can’t change the decision or the variety of frames per second, which could be vital for holding your podcast’s reminiscence and bandwidth utilization in examine.
Conclusion
When planning your on-line educating, it would be best to use a mix of audio, video, slides, and digital blackboards to create an immersive expertise even whereas college students are studying remotely. Open supply software program provides superior, efficient instruments for creating such on-line instructional experiences.
This article is predicated on “Open source software for online teaching in the times of corona” on Mathias Hoffman’s weblog and is reused with permission.
