Abstract:

Most universities in our environment switched to e-learning education methods during the first wave of the Covid-19 outbreak. The administration at our institution first decided to completely switch all the lectures from in-person, face-to-face physical lectures to online based e-learning methods, mainly asynchronous learning, based on students access to available "offline" documents - presentations and textbooks prepared by the teachers, extended with the student obligation to perform and upload homework. A few weeks later, the decision was changed and the teachers had to offer synchronous e-learning for our students, basically including the online lectures performed as defined in the official lecture schedule. In other words, all the lectures were to be performed online in the usual time schedule, using available network tools and equipment.

In order to offer additional value for the students not being able to participate in real-time, allowing them to watch the lecture asynchronously on-demand, a video recording of the videoconference/lecture could be simply uploaded and made available to students. However, some limitations of the videoconferencing platform lead us to the adapted approach presented. The procedure used is completely described in this paper - the synchronous e-learning is based on Google Meet videoconferencing software (official institution accounts are based on GSuite), while the rest of the approach includes the concurrent usage of the open-source video editing software called OBS Studio and uploading video lectures to YouTube. The lectures we applied this approach to included computer networks and skill-based web app development. In addition to lectures, introductory parts of computer labs for those lectures were realized using the same approach. The intention was to avoid (possibly unauthorized due to some student-related data or interaction being visible) direct usage of videoconferencing software recordings on one side, but also to decrease the lecturer's time consumption on another side (additional or recurrent recordings just to offer asynchronous lectures video). Some drawbacks of the proposed approach are also discussed in the paper, as well as possible improvements that would allow the lecturer to be more efficient when producing that kind of material. It must be stated that our approach performs well when taking presentation based (+ virtual whiteboard + lecturer video clip) lectures, while its usage for more interactive or real whiteboard based lectures is limited or partially possible.

Keywords:

Synchronous, asynchronous, e-learning, Covid-19, videoconferencing, recording, OBS Studio, YouTube.