Brent Warner
This is the HigherEdTech podcast Season Two episode 16: What to do when your synchronous class desynchronizes and preparing for loss of video storage.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I am Tim van Norman, the instructional technologist here at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner
And I’m Brent Warner Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. So Brent, just got done with spring break. How are you doing? All racks rested and relaxed? Ready to go?

Brent Warner
Nope, none of that. I did not get a lot of relaxation going on in that spring break. I was presenting for conferences and you know, I just had things going on, including getting my COVID shot, which is nice. So so at least I’m I’m on that path. I know you’re you’re on that path as well. Are you done?

Tim Van Norman
I’m done.

Brent Warner
You’re done. Okay.

Tim Van Norman
I’m done.

Brent Warner
So I started my path. And then it kind of knocked me out my plans to like, do things kind of fell fell apart. And so here I am not as rested as I’d like to are you doing?

Tim Van Norman
I’m doing well. It was it was a fairly quiet week, I got some work done and stuff. So you know, I I was in the office other than Friday. So yeah, it was good. Good, good, good.

Brent Warner
So today, we’re going to be talking about a couple of kind of bigger concept things. So synchronous classes, desynchronizing. And also preparation for loss of video storage. We’ll talk about why we’re talking about those in a minute. But let’s just jump over to it.

Tim Van Norman
So Brent, — This first one, you were interested in, You brought it to me and I loved it. Synchronous Class Desynchronizing. What in the world is that? Lots of “synchs” in there. Yeah, because we’ve talked about asynchronous synchronous, so talk to me, what why would you want to talk about this?

Brent Warner
Well, okay, so for me, because it happened to me, which is in the middle of class, my program fell apart. And you know, that type of thing happens, right? You could lose your Wi Fi connection, if you’re connected on Wi Fi. If you’re not, if you’re not hardwired in your computer could just shut down possibly, right. In my case, it was a glitch in the system that fell apart. But any type of thing can happen where where, you know, your live in person class are synchronized, right? And then all of a sudden, it’s like, Wait a second, things aren’t going well. And I have to follow up, like, I have to break apart my class. You also mentioned when I brought this up, you’re like, Oh, yeah, cuz also, zoom bombers can bring this apart, right? So hey, I had to just click the button, cancel my class, which don’t do but there are solutions to it. But But there, there are lots of different things that might happen when all of a sudden you’re planning on having class and it just gets totally disrupted. Right. And so I thought this would be a good topic to kind of share, discuss, you know, it just happens to the best of us. And and I think it’s a it’s something to just be generally prepared for.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely agree. And to that point, also, I know of somebody who found out that they’re going to have internet down at their house tomorrow. And so what do they do? How do they teach their class while they will not have internet at all? So this isn’t a tool issue. This is no internet. And so these are the types of things that when you mentioned it, I like yes, we want to talk about this. So So I love your first point here, keep calm.

Brent Warner
Yeah. So for me, this happened. This happened today, earlier today. And as you know, well, one, I always talk and I kind of promote the idea with your students is, you know, the way you behave and the way that you make things happen in the classes, the way that they will deal with those things, right. And so I talked about that mindset of experimenting and being open to things that might not work very well. And so in my case, it was like, Okay, we got a problem here. It might take five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes to solve this and get sorted out on what’s going on. And but definitely stay calm with that, right? Like because your students will stick around. I mean, they’re there. Right now. They’re just sitting at home for the most part. And if you’re in a synchronous class, they’re logged on, they’re waiting for it. So secret you might not know but they could possibly have another tab open that they go to Go do something else. But the big idea for you as a teacher is just stay keep it cool, right? Hey, let them know there’s a problem. And also, I’m going to skip ahead a step that we had mentioned here, who knows, but, but telling your students ahead of time, or letting them know, hey, if there ever any problems, this is something that you might want to do, or this is going to be the process for it. So if I just disappear from class, all of a sudden, keep an eye out on your canvas announcements, for example, or keep an eye on your emails, because I will send out a message saying what’s going on, or tell them, Hey, this is this is gonna be our backup plan, or whatever that is. So I think this kind of ties in together, it’s easier to stay calm, when you know what the plan is, or when you have at least set that up for your students. And they would understand, okay, I get a longer break or whatever is right, something’s gonna happen here. And we’re gonna figure that out.

Tim Van Norman
Right, and I think that’s exactly what you need to be. It helps you stay calm when you’re prepared. Now, you can’t prepare for every possible thing. But you can prepare for zoom going down, and you can’t get on zoom, whether it’s you, whether it’s whatever you can prepare for that you can prepare for, you know, just a few things. But that will automatically make you better. Just simply by being aware of it and, and letting your students know, this is the default way of doing it. We’ve had Canvas go down in the middle of the day. Okay, so if you were relying on canvas to communicate with your students, now, what do you do, we have different ways here at IVC, where you can send an email out to every single one of their college email address accounts very, very quickly by sending one email out. So understand where those are, will help you remain calm, and will help your students remain calm. If they know, hey, my teachers got me, all I need to do is check my email, and I should be okay.

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah. So we did talk about some actual things that you can do, right? And I’ll start it off with you on this one, Tim? some actual, what would you do in that moment? So you’re like, Okay, I’m calm, but I still need to do something.

Tim Van Norman
So I love this point, here, I log on with a second device, for instance, your cell phone. So let’s say your internet goes down, or you think your internet might have gone down in your house, your cell phone is running off of a different network, right? So you can log on to zoom, simply type in that code, or it might already be sitting there on your phone. And now you’re in and you’re at least talking with your students. That can be very, very quick, very easy. And what many faculty have told me is that their students are still waiting for them. Kind of, to your point earlier, is they’re just waiting. Okay, something happened, we’ll be back. Now, obviously, it’s not ideal to run it off your cell phone. But it’s sure better than sitting there and everybody looking at a blank screen.

Brent Warner
Yeah. And I think I do know that some teachers are like, Well hold on a second, I don’t want to run this on my data plan and those types of things. But like, we can even talk about this just in a very short term, right? Hey, I’m just logging in for a minute, I’m having a problem. You can leave your camera off, you can just talk over it. You can even call in, right if you use the Zoom call in function. And you can just quickly say, Hey, guys, this is what’s happening. Hold on, it’ll take me about 10 minutes to get this sorted. Keep an eye on your email just to just to reinforce or just share with them. So a secondary device, even like, even if your Wi Fi is completely down, you can just log on to the network with it and at least get the fundamental information out pretty quickly.

Tim Van Norman
And it might be that your fundamental information is I look forward to seeing you next time.

Brent Warner
That’s right.

Tim Van Norman
But it’s a whole lot better than all of a sudden poof, gone. You know, so. So yes, you can shut it down. But there’s, you can do it in a more graceful manner. That’s right. So and by the way, I often when I’m presenting, I often have two devices on all the time anyway. So I may have a wired laptop and a wired desktop and a laptop that’s just sitting there monitoring. If my desktop goes down, I have my laptop, I can hit a couple buttons, and I’m up and running. When I’m presenting I do that a lot. And that’s a nice thing just to do for a general just to have a second device. Now if your internet goes down, both are going down. But it’s one of those things that that just protects you in case of something smaller than your internet going down.

Brent Warner
Because it’s not always you know, like we can easily imagine Well, it’s just my internet went down so everything but there are lots of different situations where these things can happen including Just your computer dies, right? And locks up. Yeah, I used to have a job as what was called a technical producer for online courses like this. And, and that was the policy at the company that I worked for is you had to have two computers. And so I had my primary computer. And then I had my monitoring commute computer. And it was also a good function too, because that monitoring computer, let me see things from the attendees point of view, which was pretty valuable a lot of the times,

Tim Van Norman
yep, it also gives you as a side, it gives you the ability to have all of the participants on one screen. And that way, when you’re presenting, you’re projecting what’s on the screen, you’re not trying to look through people right to do it if you’ve only got one screen. So it’s kind of a nice aside on there. Another one that I loved here is, especially if it’s not your internet goes down and say it is Canvas, say it is zoom that goes down, if that’s what you’re using, move to a secondary platform, right. So you can update on canvas, you can say, hey, send an announcement out, put it on the homepage, something like that, here at IVC. And at many colleges, you’ve got access to Google meat. which, frankly, a lot of students are familiar with. That’s what a lot of high schools and middle schools especially are using right now, instead of zoom. So they might already be more familiar with Google meat, you can go in and send them a link really, really quick. And now get everybody on that, even if you’re not familiar with it. So maybe you’re not doing as you know, the breakout rooms you’re used to in the sharing of the screen you’re used to, but at least you’re on a platform that everybody can work in.

Brent Warner
That’s right, yeah. And this could be any of these platforms. So Google meet, we’ve talked about Cranium Cafe in the past, or recent, in depth conversations about Discord. And I even know a lot of teachers that like set up a social media stream for their students, you know, so like, they use things like WeChat, or, you know, some of these different platforms, or they just have something available to them. So it’s pretty easy. It’s a one click in, it is a good idea to know, for example, hey, I’ve never used Google meat before, maybe I should just open it up one time before just in case, it’s not hard. It’s a single click thing, which is meet.google.com. That’s met.google.com. It’s it’s not for barbecuing. But you know, it’s it’s pretty great. Like it’s pretty simple, fast, easy to access, you won’t have some of the features and functions. But if you’re just saying, hey, I need to talk, I need to share my screen, you’ll be able to get that done pretty well.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. And then I love this next step that you were that you had suggested Brent, in, be ready to open an activity to fill the time, especially if you’re used to having strange things going on, on your internet connection. And by the way, every once in a while I hear somebody who just has a complete shut off, and their Internet’s down more often, it’s somebody who’s been having weird stuff going on on their internet. And so a little bit of looking ahead and saying, hey, if this ever happens to me, what can I have them do? For 20 minutes, at the end of 20 minutes, you either know if your internet is working or not right? period, okay, if it’s down for 20 minutes, it’s not going to come back up, you’ll be lucky if it does. So an activity that might fill the time could be very useful in that particular case.

Brent Warner
And this is a good, you know, pedagogical structure to or you don’t have, you’re not planning to, to lecture for a full hour or something like that, where you say, Hey, I’m going to talk a bit, then you’re going to do an activity, then I’m going to talk about then you’re going to do an activity, right? And you’re letting students interact. And you’re saying, hey, you’re now it’s going to be group work or something like that. So you might just be able to skip ahead and say, okay, hey, instead of me talk me explaining it first. And then you doing it, I’m gonna have you guys do it, and then we’ll deconstruct it afterwards, right. And so there’s totally sound pedagogy that can go along with that, depending on how you structured your class and what you’ve what you prepared for and those types of things. But there certainly are ways to make it work. And I’m not saying that you have to plan a contingency extra activity for every class, okay, but don’t get me wrong here. But I’m just saying like, hey, think about what’s going on in the structure, you’ve got your you’re breathing, you’re giving yourself that 15 minutes, and you say, Hey, you know what, this is what we can do to rearrange it and to make it work for right now. And then 10 the last thing that we kind of mentioned here was that you could record part so you can say, Hey, we’re gonna lose an hour, it’s gonna be gone. So I’m gonna cut you guys free. I’m gonna I’m gonna cut the cord. And, but this information is important. And so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to record it i’m going to upload it later i’m sorry that is not going to be a synchronous thing but you you save your hour here please make sure that you take advantage of this hour somewhere else because there are there are things that we need to know in order to get moving forward and so you might lose that time in the moment when you planned to use it but you know sometimes we have to make those adjustments to to do things that we weren’t planning on doing and so hey alright i’m just going to shift i’m going to i’m going to do the the screen recording thing get it out there help my students so that they’re not going to fall behind based on nothing that they did wrong and so there might be some some elements that you can make adjustments for to help your students along too

Tim Van Norman
Basically in the end by thinking about it a little bit ahead of time we’re hoping that you’ll be able to find ways so that when that emergency happens and all the sudden something crashes and you’re not able to use it it becomes an opportunity for you to keep on going and it’s not just the end of that class for that day

Brent Warner
That’s right

Tim Van Norman
So we wanted to give a zippy tip it’s been a couple of episodes and this one is really good especially for community colleges in california and it’s college buys.org if you haven’t been there you can get adobe creative cloud for $40 a year that includes by the way Adobe Acrobat so great price

Brent Warner
That’s an incredible price!

Tim Van Norman
Trust me, it’s beyond incredible it’s more than that per month for everybody else so 40 bucks a year is amazing you can get a hotspot for $20 a month so if you want to have a hotspot you’re going up i use it often for going into the mountains now all of a sudden i have a hotspot i have internet connection even though i don’t need it at home and another one is you can get an ipad for 100 bucks they’ve got ipad twos 16 gig for $100 now these are refurbished but if you’re interested in playing with something you want to try something out in your class something like this can be a really nice tool for you really quick inexpensive and get you up and running

Brent Warner
That’s right it’s worth looking through on this site anything kind of techie or whatever that you’re going to be buying i would say that this is a great place to look and you get the advantage of you know getting that kind of teacher discount which we always say hey where’s our teacher discount well, it’s there at college buys.

Tim Van Norman
This is huge.

Brent Warner
Alright Tim so the second thing we’re talking about this kind of like a troubleshooting episode right is preparation for loss of video storage and what does that mean well this is something that’s happening for us right now on campus and so lots of video storage we kind of have this image like oh i just record it and it’s going to be there and there’s access to it as it’s turning out that’s not really the case so why is this an issue for people

Tim Van Norman
So first of all there’s no such thing as unlimited storage google for instance google workspace before it was google suite used to say that oh if you had the right kind of account you had unlimited storage well we knew that that was never the case we just knew that it was a lot more than most people would use and i’ve been frankly you know that’s great i loved it but zoom has also started to crack down a little bit on it and different different organizations have realized oh now we’ve got to pay for this and so because frankly all you have to do is look online at what the cost of a hard drive is and you’ll realize storage isn’t free right there is a cost to somebody so what can we do to minimize some of those costs is is what’s happening on this they’re sharing the expense etc so what’s happening for a lot is we’re looking at things like rent you just told me about this earlier today that google workspace for education is changing its policy and they’re about to looks like effective july of 2022 they’re going to limit storage for us so we don’t know what that means it’s fortunately for us right now it’s a year plus away but yeah it’s bad we would like to know more and i’m sure we’re gonna learn a lot more but that said you know we all know that at some point storage is going to start costing that’s right so what do we do about that how do we get there and so there’s a couple of different parts that we want to look at in this number one just like anything that you store it takes up space so do you really need five copies of it

Brent Warner
Spring cleaning is something you should be doing on your desktop I think is what we’re getting at here right like there’s so much stuff on my computer Tim, that it’s like, oh, I would be embarrassed right now to show you my desktop because I was kind of I, when I clean things up and physically and digitally, like I put it all in a junk pile, and then I sort through it right, like, so that’s kind of what I ended up doing. But if you looked at my desktop, right now, it’s just a clutter of files on top of files on top of files, right. And so this is something I need to do to go through this process of cleaning it up and getting through, but clear out your old stuff. Like, you might think, I think that this we have a mentality that digital things are unlimited storage. And we need to kind of clear ourselves of that and start you know, being more regular and, and realizing, hey, you know, that picture that I took of, you know, shoes, I screenshotted, this picture of shoes that I might want to buy five years ago, and I either bought them or I never did. And I don’t need the picture of them anymore, right? So that type of thing on and on and on and on.

Tim Van Norman
Well, and you might have five copies of your resume. Okay, five copies that are all five years old. So which one is the current one? Oh, none of those, you know, so maybe keep one copy, things like that. So granted, we’ve gotten away from video when we talk about this, but video is even worse, right? Because what a lot of people will do is they’ll download the raw, and then they’ll edit it and save that one. And then they’ll edit it and save that one. And then they’ll edit it and save that one. Now they have three or four copies, well, if it started at one gig, you’re taking up a lot of space for this one video that you need, you’re taking up four gig or something like that of storage someplace. So be careful with that. And frankly, maybe keep the raw and keep the the fully edited. Correct. Get rid of everything in between and stuff like that. So just do be careful. I do like keeping the raw I’m one of those. I’m a packrat when it comes to digital, which is why I have way too much stuff in Google. But read yours is on your desktop mine is all in Google. Yeah. But yeah, it’s the same thing. However, one of the things that we’re talking about, what I would suggest is make a backup of all of those files that you want to keep all of the video files, make a copy on, like an external hard drive, right, you can go to Costco for 100 bucks, get what a 3534 terabyte hard drive, I think it’s about 100 bucks, 150 that will hold lots and lots and lots of videos. That’s right, plugged that into your computer, download them on there. And now you got something that that’s pretty secure. And it’s a good backup for all of that type of media. Yet, notice I didn’t say the only store on the hard drive, save a backup there. Then also, be careful where you store them. So for instance, zoom, we’ve basically many people have looked at zoom for us as unlimited storage forever. I know because I’ve just been looking at really really old videos, trying to help people as they’re cleaning it up, and then store it in other locations that make sense. If it’s active in your class stored on something like three C Media, or here with the community colleges, it’s a great tool for us. It’s active, and it’s one copy. So if you use it in four different classes, it’s still only one copy of that it’s not four copies up in Canvas. So it’s a great way to do that. Other ones YouTube, okay, you’ve got it, you’ve got access to it, go ahead and you can put stuff on YouTube, it’s available. It’s, it’s depending on how you are using it in your class. That’s a great place for personal files as well. If you want to or if you’re sharing something with the world or something like that. Do in every one of these cases do read their terms and conditions. Okay, don’t put student video on YouTube. Okay, YouTube is not FERPA compliant.

Brent Warner
Right. But if you’re recording your own, screenshot your own video recording of yourself talking through something perfect, right? Go ahead and upload that to YouTube. You can you can share that publicly. A lot of teachers nowadays too, are doing like, hey, the things that I make for my students, I also make available to anybody who wants to use it who might be valuable to and so a lot of us I mean, all teachers know this because we all search YouTube and go well let’s find a video on this thing, right and a lot of times that really good content is made by another teacher. Right. And so, so there, there are features inside of there there, you know, we can worry about other, you know, potential problems. We can talk about that in the future YouTube and YouTube and teaching in the future. But you know, you at least you’ve got a video uploaded. I think the big thing here, Tim, Vimeo, Google Drive all these things. I think the big thing to talk about here, though, is like, I think what most of the teachers are doing right now is they’re just clicking record on zoom. And then they’re clicking stop. And they’re going well, that was, you know, three years ago, and I never used it again after that. But like, what if I may be needed? Again? It’s like, No, you don’t need it again. Right? So be willing to let go, I think is a big part here.

Tim Van Norman
Well, and how many times do you need? Over the last three weeks? I’ve recorded up to three times the same presentation, right? How many of those do I actually need? maybe none. Okay. But the point being, I sure don’t need three of the same thing.

Brent Warner
Right, right. And so if you’re repeating your presentation, maybe you don’t need to record that, again, maybe you can just cut it all off and just say, hey, I’ve already recorded this somewhere else. So here it is available to you, this particular recording of me whatever, you know, if you wanted to, like I think we A lot of us do this out of kindness for our students. But we could also tell our students, hey, if you want a recording of this, and you can turn on the recording feature on your computer, and you can record it too. Now you’ve given them permission for all those types of things. Maybe there could be other issues with that. But, you know, you don’t necessarily have to be the bearer of all digital goods that you have ever talked any time. And so I think that’s something that a lot of teachers feel responsible for. And I certainly do a lot of the time. But I also say, Well, you know, we all lived a real long time, and we had successful classes without recordings of every minute of us talking every time.

Tim Van Norman
Well and and going back to a point before. Do remember that anytime you upload to a service, be careful where you use it. Oppa is an issue, especially if you’re recording your lectures and students are are asking questions and stuff like that, or you’re getting a view of the students or something, do make sure that it is either properly edited or that you don’t use it improperly. Just be aware of that, because you don’t want to get in trouble. We don’t want to get in trouble. So just be careful.

Brent Warner
So a couple other things Tim’s we have all these you know, video storage things. One thing, figure out if there’s a way if there’s a possibility of reducing the size of the file, right? Sometimes you have that raw storage, right, and you record it and you you rerelease it at 4k? It’s like Well, hold on a second. This is just a tiny explanation on black and white text of me explaining something does that need to be a 4k video? Or is it okay for like, an SD or 720. Yeah, so something real basic, go in, take a look inside of Google or just search it like how to lower, you know, smaller, smaller video size. That’s it like you can make it pretty easily.

Tim Van Norman
And basically, any video editor will give you the ability to do that screencast ematic, when you save it, you can change the size. Same thing with Camtasia. Basically, any video editor will give you that capability.

Brent Warner
That’s right, anything else to think about here for if you’re going to lose a bunch of videos, or if you’re going to need to make sure that you’re going to be okay for this?

Tim Van Norman
Well, especially if you’re doing zoom, the chat if you are going to want the chat for some reason in the future, store that right away. So why that comes up is if you are if you are going through and you’re taking attendance on chat, maybe you want those files, those chat files stored someplace so that you can get back to them very quickly. When a student says I made I was there the first three weeks of class, you know, and you have to now go back through 18 weeks of class to find that any attendance, any reporting that you want to keep crab all of that right away, and store it on your computer. Those are really small store together with the video and it’s great. If you have the video captioned, always store the caption file, preferably with the video. Why? Because if you use closed captions, which is what most people do, then that caption file is not actually physically stored in the video file unless you do some real specific things. It’s stored separate from it and you attach it. So keep track of that caption file that can be incredibly useful later and make it so we don’t have to pay you somebody doesn’t have to pay for getting captioned again. So, just a few things to make sure that you’re storing when you store out your video. Awesome. Thank you for listening today. In this episode we talked about what to do when your synchronous Class D synchronizes and preparing for loss of video storage. For more information about this show, please visit our website at the higher ed tech podcast Comm. There you will find our podcasts and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner
As always, we do want your feedback. So please go to the higher ed tech podcast calm and let us know your thoughts. If you have ideas for future shows, there’s a link on there that you can give us some of your topic ideas for as well.

Tim Van Norman
Or everyone at IVC. That’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support at 949-451-5696 or by emailing IVC tech@ivc.edu. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please contact me Tim van Norman at tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on Twitter or Instagram @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman
I’m Tim VanNorman,

Brent Warner
and I’m Brent Warner. And we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody