Table of Contents
Distance Education in Times of Corona
This new situation on short notice is very challenging for students and lecturers.
A personal note to my students (2020-04-04)
Dear Students,
welcome to to our courses!
Because of the Corona epidemic (CoViD-19) it is quite likely that we will perform our courses at least partly in distance learning / teaching. It is not decided by the Federal State, yet, how long the physical isolation has to continue, but anyway the university is preparing for distance education.
For a few weeks I have already been screening several supporting tools such as various video conference systems, video streaming platforms, screen cast production methods as well as software deployment to install software on private student computers and external servers. The number of tools and options is overwhelming and a bit petrifying. Because of that I have been wasting quite some time already.
Personally I would prefer a significant portion of interactive formats with you instead of pre-produced video podcasts. The discussion with you discovering interesting and even unexpected research questions is what shapes my teaching. This is what I love most about my profession as lecturer.
But I am quite a beginner in distance education. I have not figured out, yet, which tools are suited most for which course formats. Therefore I beg your patience and support! We have to collaborate closely to discover and experiment together not just with content but also with learning methods! Let us form a team to sculpture our joint courses together! I want you to become advisors and trainers for our course as well!
This time opens a lot of new opportunities to discover and play! I am really looking forward to an interesting, future-oriented learning and teaching experience with you!
And I am looking forward to meet you personally again, soon, with less than 2m physical distance!
Kind regards,
Rolf Becker
Affected Courses
Delivering Care Packages to AMC Students
(2020-04-24)
AMC stands for Applied Measurment and Control, a study course of the Environment and Energy program at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences (HSRW). AMC is based on DIY. Students use Arduino related electronics and software in combination with IoT principles to set up their own environmental monitoring or control systems.
To enable students to work on this fascinating subject I decided not to postpone the course but to send parcels stuffed with gadgets to the students.
| Video: Packing Student Care Packages for AMC in our Garden. |
Python for Data Science
Currently I prefer Python as versatile scripting language for automated data acquisition, data conversion and data presentation. I will try to incorporate the CoViD-19 challenge in my Scientific Programming lecture!
More to come …
Software Installation on Private Student Computers
Several of my courses are related to programming. For distance education it is more important than ever that students install the required development environments and other useful software products locally on their own machines.
Go to ⇒ Installation Instructions
Video Conference (VC) Systems we Would Like to Evaluate
Go to ⇒ Our own comparison of VC systems
Using Discord for Teaching
Several students suggest to use Discord as a chat platform for the courses. This is an excellent idea!
https://blog.discord.com/how-to-use-discord-for-your-classroom-8587bf78e6c4
Hosting Your Own Jitsi Server
I am trying to set up a Jitsi-Meet platform on a server I rent from a provider. The installation is difficult. It is running but I am not very happy with the installation, yet. There are smarter ways which I am not capable of.
Should you be interested have a look at