I thought you had TA's for that sort of stuff.
People are addressing millions of subscribers on social media sites and you can't figure out how to stream your class? Join the real world, where the rest of us ARE FORCED to adapt or lose relevancy or worse, our jobs.
The A/V stuff should be figured out by your University IT/Telecom staff.
Hire a guy who can handle the camera and edit the videos. Have professors plan the lecture, do the talking, and verify that the end product is okay. The guy with the camera can edit videos on multiple subjects, because he doesn't really have to understand the topics.
Of course, if the professors have to learn (each of them separately) how to handle the camera and edit the videos, that is a horrible waste of time. But that's just... lack of strategic thinking on the university's part. It doesn't necessarily have to be that way.
The skillset of a proffesor is not video editing and university is not a video studio. It is idiotic for a thousand universities around the world to make a thousand videos that explain how compilers works (or whatever).
Furthermore, 21st century learning should be interactive, so actually all those lecturers should become videogame developers
> The skillset of a proffesor is not video editing and university is not a video studio.
yes but then again, plain refusing to learn even the basic is ridiculous. you don't have to start a youtube channel and do all the editing yourself, you just have to learn to drive a webcam and a microphone in a decent manner. it's not rocket science.
It's not fun when they're on the learning side, isn't it?
They wouldn't even have to do that. Just have one guy who does this, and give him a room he can prepare for shooting -- to set up the camera and the microphone, the light, a blackboard, a flipchart, whatever.
The professor would just have to prepare the lesson, and to talk to the empty room. Actually, you could even arrange a few people for the audience; in the back side of the room, with masks. There would be almost no difference compared to the usual lesson.
And then -- optionally -- the professor could also give some pictures to the camera guy (the pictures could be made on paper, let the camera guy scan them), and say "when I say this and this at 0:25:00, please show this picture instead of my face". And let the guy do this, too. And then let him upload it to YouTube or Vimeo or wherever.
This is really not about having the professors learn something new. It's just about the professors, or administration, or whoever can make the decision, willing to try something new. And find a budget to hire one guy outside of academia. (If you are lucky, you could find one among your students, but it would be easier to not rely on that.) Heck, I would even volunteer to do that, but I don't have solid camera skills.
I don't really see any plausible excuse here. This could be accomplished even with professors who have literally zero computer skills and are unable to learn any. (Frankly, I wouldn't even want to waste their time learning how to use a camera. I'd prefer them to focus on providing a great lecture, rather than mediocre video editing.) There are even universities that did this long before Covid, and often the professor wasn't the one who handled the camera.
I suppose this is just a perspective of someone who does not work in academia. I work for a private company that has branches in multiple cities. We regularly had video meetings even before Covid. I didn't have to learn any camera skills; I just entered the e-meeting room, clicked a button, the camera and the projector turned on, the people in the other city did the same thing, and then we started talking. Everything else happened automatically. Is there a good reason why the same thing couldn't happen in education?
Right. As a professor, I'm not embracing this at all. We all hate the situation and don't really know what the best thing to do is.