I have always liked in-front-of-the-board teaching (no slides) but also wanted to incorporate computer technology, e.g., to make numerical demonstrations (especially for advanced classes), show videos, or hard-to-reproduce plots. In traditional classroom teaching, this was never practical. (You have to start up a computer, the projector, bring down the screen, then, bring it up, turn off the projector.)

Now, I do this efficiently with Zoom.

I am attaching a short video clip from my Monday lecture, recorded via Zoom. Note that I heavily compressed the video clip to attach to this email; actual video quality is better. My main initial difficulty with teaching on the board via Zoom was that the field of view was too small, so I had to clean the board frequently. To solve this problem, I have set up two cameras (from an iPhone + an iPad, but it could be any smartphone + any laptop). I have positioned them, so they covered two adjacent blackboards (yes, I love blackboards and intensely dislike whiteboards, and yes, we have a blackboard in our living room, but you can use your office board). Then, when I want to show my Matlab code live, all I have to do is to click “share desktop” on my computer. When I am done, I go back to the board after simply clicking “stop sharing”. It takes a few seconds literally.

I am sure you all have developed your preferred methods, but if you are interested in duplicating my setup, it is easier than it looks. I explain it below, and if you have any questions, let me know.

My setup:

– I used an iPhone, an iPad, and a computer. You can get by equally well with a laptop and a smartphone.

– I started Zoom from the computer, where I also did the recording. Recording locally and to the cloud work equally well.

– Then, I “join” the meeting from the iPhone and the iPad successively using the same (official Bilkent-assigned Zoom) account. I turned off the video from the computer since I was not using its camera.

– I had the screen of my iPad facing me (using the front camera), so I could also see myself live, but this depends on your preference.

– It is essential to enable “do not show non-video participants,” so the images of the other participants do not appear on the device from which you are recording. Otherwise, they will be part of the recording as well (they can be kept on your other device(s) if you want to see their faces, this is not a problem).

– Zoom will display both video images side by side if the aspect ratio of the window of the Zoom application is wide enough. You can easily resize the window to get them to appear adjacent to each other.

– If the order of the two camera images is wrong (the portion of the board which is physically on the right side of the wall appears on the left on your screen), then turn off the camera of the one on the left and turn back on immediately. Now, it will appear on the right.

– If you are not using the computer’s camera, then also click “do not show own screen,” so it also does not take up valuable space.

– I used a tripod to position my iPhone. The iPad was sitting on a piece of furniture at the time of this video, but today I received a second tripod, so from now on, both will be on tripods, allowing easier positioning. Tripods and tablet/phone adapters for tripods are cheap, so I recommend that invest in them because it makes positioning your device trivially easy.

– When I wanted to share my Matlab screen, all I do is sit in front of my computer, engage “share desktop” from it. I kept the images from the camera on as two small windows (as you can see in the video) in case I had to refer to them, but you can disable them if you’d like.

– Before going back to the board, all I had to do was to click “stop sharing”.

– I used Bluetooth headphones, which eliminate any environmental noise.

– At the end of the lecture, Zoom converts the video. It creates black blank sections around both of the camera images. I cropped them out with a video-editing software, so it looks nicer, but this is entirely optional.

– I upload the lecture videos to Moodle, so even if someone’s connection failed, nothing is missed, save the opportunity to ask me a question on the spot.

– I love blackboards. They have excellent contrast — whiteboards have terrible contrast and are highly reflective. Unlike board markers, which smell not only awful but sneakily run out of ink in the middle of a lecture, it is simple with chalk; if you can hold it, you can write with it! Good-quality chalk hardly produces any dust. I also believe that the rhythmic sound chalk-writing helps focus student attention. Finally, the sheer pleasure of writing with chalk is unparalleled!

What’s next for me?

– The only thing I dislike compared to in-class teaching is that I cannot see the faces of the students asking questions. Next, I want to improve my experience by asking all students to provide their facial photos, so I can see the picture of the one asking the question on the screen of the iPad, which is facing me.

Currently, their names are being displayed, which is an improvement over real classroom teaching. If I can also see their photos, I will learn their names very quickly. This is not another aspect where the online teaching experience is superior to in-class teaching.