Toward Video-Conferencing Tools for Hands-On Activities in Online Teaching

Abstract

Many instructors in computing and HCI disciplines use hands-on activities for teaching and training new skills. Beyond simply teaching hands-on skills like sketching and programming, instructors also use these activities so students can acquire tacit skills. Yet, current video-conferencing technologies may not effectively support hands-on activities in online teaching contexts. To develop an understanding of the inadequacies of current video-conferencing technologies for hands-on activities, we conducted 15 interviews with university-level instructors who had quickly pivoted their use of hands-on activities to an online context during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on our analysis, we uncovered four pedagogical goals that instructors have when using hands-on activities online and how instructors were unable to adequately address them due to the technological limitations of current video-conferencing tools. Our work provides empirical data about the challenges that many instructors experienced, and in so doing, the pedagogical goals we identify provide new requirements for video-conferencing systems to better support hands-on activities.

Exploring Capturing Approaches in Shared Fabrication Workshops: Current Practice and Opportunities

“…We can also see some opportunities due to the Sars-Cov2 pandemic which saw most fabrication workshops closed for extended periods and large parts of the population constraint to their homes. Instructors who taught hands-on activities during this period were interviewed by Labrie et al [42] and reported having difficulties to verbally indicate to the students to move the camera such as showing a part of the physical objects. We can imagine extending our design concept with connected units that could broadcast the stream of the different students of the class to the instructor, and provide her with remote control access of the orientation or position of the cameras to enable a better vision on the progress of students in real time.…”