 Hi everyone. Hi, Sanya. Hi, Janos. So remote education. Yes, we're doing remote education. So we're doing the same thing here now at a virtual conference that we're talking about. We're going to at least try to implement exactly what we're talking about. Yeah, do you remember those good old times in 2019 when everybody used to sit in a classroom and the teacher was talking about something but nobody really cared? Yes, but there were whispers which is not really possible anymore and there were little paper notes that you would throw around. Yeah, especially with paper airplanes when they hit the teacher. Never happened. Never. Ever. Yeah, and then this pandemic thing came along. That was interesting. Yeah, that was interesting and once everybody stopped panicking, everybody started buying up toilet paper. That is true. Yeah, and once that was done, everybody thought, okay, well, we still need to do certain things like work. And school. Yeah, and then suddenly you saw eight-year-olds sitting in front of computers and having meetings and scheduling their day using Outlook. Yeah, that is true. Not all use Outlook though. Yeah, somebody use Google Calendar. Yeah. Yeah, and you know what bugged me about these online lectures? Especially the... Tell me Janos. As if you don't know. Yeah, it's the audio quality. That's my big bugbear when you suddenly have a lecture that you used to have in a classroom and now you have it recorded by a laptop microphone that you can't really hear properly. And it's a lot harder to understand. See, I think this is where learning types come into play because for me, the most annoying thing are spelling errors and grammar mistakes and stuff like that. Yeah, I can see how that could trigger... People like me. Yeah, OCD much. Mr. Audio, everything has to be absolutely perfect. Yes. Yeah, so the thing is when you're in a classroom and you're listening to someone who's explaining something, then you have a lot of nonverbal cues like how they move, how they gesticulate, their mouth movements, etc. And even if the room's not so perfect in terms of hearing what the person's saying, it's a lot easier to understand than a disconnected voice. And on the other hand, suddenly you're not sitting in a classroom and you have nothing better to do than listen to that certain someone, but you're cooking or you're having an ice cream or you're driving, etc. So I think that society changed as well in terms of how we consume content. There's one good thing about not seeing the verbal and nonverbal cues is you don't see all the eye rolls. That's true, but in which direction is the question? Both. Yes, so here comes the question. So how do you make a good learning material that is suitable for how society changed, how we learn nowadays? So I think what we really have to consider here is the learning journey. You know, in consulting, they have things called customer journey, where basically you try to depict how the customer would go to the target of what they want to their goal, how they would achieve their goal. And in this sense, we're talking about the learning journey, the learning path, where we're really discussing how can we get a better understanding of the topic we want to teach and how is it connected to the previous topics? Okay, but what you're saying is what you're creating is not really a learning material. It's more like a guide, a path for someone to learn something. But that's exactly what education should be. And is it always? It should be. It should be. So how do you make this path then? So as an educator, how do you make sure that your students follow the path that you're designing for them and that they understand what they need to understand? I think this is where we're actually discussing is there one path or are there more? And in this case, remote education doesn't actually matter as much as education. So if we follow a multimodal approach and if we follow the having audio, having properly spelled written material as well as interactive material, this is what helps and this is... That's what multimodal means? Multimodal means you have different mediums, different modes of learning. So why do we even need different modes of learning? Because everyone has a different learning type and obviously usually it's a mix. You're not just an auditive learner. You're not just a visual learner, but you tend to more, you prefer reading a book. You prefer listening to a podcast. You prefer watching video. And obviously there are some generational shifts, but also just personal preferences. For example, I don't care about audio at all. So why are we doing an audio then? Well, you care. Yeah, anyway, in terms of learning, so doesn't that mean when you have to follow this multimodal approach that that's a lot more work for the person creating this educational material? It doesn't have to be because there are different tools that you can use to not have additional work. But the immediate additional work that you will have is if you previously used a lot of open learning and would just throw links or book references at your students, wherever you are, school, university, adult learning, education, institutions, it doesn't really matter. But if you would just throw references at your students, yes, you will have more work. But usually you will have material. If you're a good educator, you have tons of material. So now you just have to think about how can you make it remotely digestible? Yes. So what you're saying is that you don't have to throw out everything that you did so far. Just transform it in a certain way. Remotely digestible was actually really good because how do you make it digestible? Kind of remotely sort of, but also remote, yeah? Yes. So that's one of the things that I had, I was in the lucky position of doing is I inherited some educational material from my predecessor and took over a course at University of Applied Sciences and then just put it into a format that was amenable to remote learning. So talking about spelling, one of your big bug bears is writing, right? Yes. Writing has to be done really, really well. Why? Or should I say you have to do writing really, really well? Yes. One of the things that we have to pay attention to is to not use the passive voice too much. Why? Or to phrase it more positively, use the active voice more. Why? Because usually you will pay attention more to something that is said in an active voice and also it's much easier to read. If we, for example, say... The mail was delivered by the postman. It's really hard to know what to focus on in this sentence but if you say... The postman delivered the mail. Then we know that the postman was the one who delivered the mail and we know what to focus on. If we want to know more about the mail, well, it depends really. You would use, for example, if you talk a lot about the mail, you would say... The mail is part of the postal service, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the passive voice could be warranted. Then you would say the mail is usually delivered by the postman. But isn't that something that you have a lot? The passive voice is very much used in when you do in-depth discussions about certain things or formalized discussions. When you try to distance yourself from the content, you use the passive voice. Yeah, so... So in this case, for example, if we're talking about the mail, we want to focus on the mail. We don't want to focus on the postman. We would use the passive voice. We would say the mail was delivered by the postman but we don't actually care because all we care about is if the mail is delivered. But if we're talking about the postman, we want to know that they deliver the mail. The other thing about text is fancy words. And when somebody wants to sound educated, then they use all these fancy words like utilize. So what about those? Yeah, we worked at a company where we had strictly a list of things that the company would never say. And we had a mascot and that mascot would never say. And then you had a list of things that were in there. For example, utilize was one of them. Or added value factor. Or things that don't really say much, sound fancy, but annoy most people. It's just something that you get used to. Is it about annoyance or is it about harder to learn? It's harder to learn. It's harder for native speakers to understand whether it's an actual word or just some construct people start to use. You mean non-native speakers. Actually non-native speakers. Yes, sometimes native speakers too. And there's also false friends. For example, American English, British English. Let's table it. In one, it means let's put it to the discussion. And in one, it means let's not discuss this further. Yeah, so especially when I mean we live in Vienna. So in Vienna, we have many nations and there is people who are not native German or English speakers. So for them, it could be a lot harder to understand certain educational material if it's not written in a very clear and concise manner. Yes, so using simple language is really the most important feature you can have for your own learning material. This also goes for things like when you put in references, like this is a very good idea. Okay, what does this refer to? Or when you use unnecessary words. For example, the test did not work because of the fact or due to the fact. And then the whole due to the fact could be written as just because. So making shorter sentences makes it a lot easier to understand what you're saying. See, in academic papers, we deliberately use obstruous word constructs like due to the fact or there is even a meme about that. Why is that? I don't know. I mean, I tend to not use it, but I've heard criticism about, you know, that I use my English is too simple when I write sometimes. Not academic enough? Not academic enough. Yeah, the last thing that I find interesting is one of the writing tips that we collected is using short sentences. This is what I have a massive problem with. I know. Maybe it's because of, I don't know if it comes from German or from Hungarian, but I really like my commas. Like one sentence, comma, next sentence, comma, next sentence. Like, oh, wait, this is four lines long. This is way too long. So that's something that I definitely have to learn. Just add dots instead of commas. So we did collect a couple of resources that, of course, we didn't talk about everything in terms of in terms of concise and good technical writing. One of the courses that I found really interesting was the one by Google. They have a whole course material on on technical writing. And the other thing that I found was the stem style guide from the Stanford University. That's really good. And I would suggest looking at. Okay, so let's say you're writing all this material. Where do you put it? Publishing content is all yours. Publishing contents, all mine. Well, yes. So content doesn't exist in a vacuum. I mean, you can make a PDF out of it and upload it to whatever university, whatever massively online core system the university has. That's, of course, one option. The other option, which I found really interesting is using open source tools. One of my favorite open source tools for writing documentation by far is MK docs. MK docs is intended for writing a documentation for say a piece of software. But it can also be used to write something educational. In fact, this is what I used for the aforementioned course. And the thing that I like about MK docs is that it uses Markdown. Markdown, if you don't know, it is a format that's really easy to learn to write. So it's not, it's not like word. So you don't have the whole graphical user interface where you click the buttons and then you visually see what's going on. Instead, you have a plain text format. And this plain text format can also be versioned in a versioning system like it, which makes it very easy to track changes and do deployments and things like that. And finally, Markdown is or MK docs, should I say is very, very customizable. So you can create your own format. You can adapt it to whatever brand you're representing. If it's your university or your educational company, et cetera. I mean, especially for universities, you have stuff like Lattech and other various Markdown tools and templates and all that type of stuff. For example, for a school, let's say a teacher who is not very well versed, they can put text in a random online Markdown generator and just as well generate Markdown that can be used with MK docs. Yes. But people who know more of what they're doing, they might just prefer Lattech, for example, because they already have all the templates there. Yes, but you can also convert Lattech to Markdown. There's converters for that too. So there is many, many options in terms of open source tooling. And I had great experience with teaching people, non-technical people to write Markdown. And for example, use the web interface of GitHub to simply edit the document. Yeah, that's good. So you have a direct feedback loop and on GitHub where you actually see what you're doing. Yes. And going further, the interesting part about using Markdown and GitHub is that GitHub and other companies like Netlify also offer free hosting. So when you use MK docs, for example, you can simply generate using the MK docs tool set. Generate a website that is then hosted for free on GitHub or Netlify or other static hosting providers. Yes, sometimes your institution will already have a learning platform where they want you to upload the content. And there it's justified about whether they accept Markdown, but it is very valid to say I don't want to actually publish it to the internet. I just want to publish it conveniently for my students. That is also an option. But with MK docs, there are even options for generating PDF files, for example. If you want to supply a PDF file to your educational institution, that is fine as well. What I would put in as a concern, though, is that students are consuming content from many different sources. For example, they're using their mobile phones more, they're learning on the go, and many educational platforms haven't exactly caught up to this. So for example, I had a rather bad experience with Moodle on mobile and that might just be because Moodle... It's not just you. Yes. So it is walking its hydro between conforming to what the systems in place are and what's good for the students. So sometimes you will end up choosing a tool that is not necessarily mainstream. So if you're the person deciding for where to publish the content and how to publish it, definitely think of responsiveness. Yes. So make it mobile friendly and that goes for everything. Not just for the text material, but also the audio which we'll talk about in a moment. It should be accessible from a mobile phone. Many of the more restricted platforms that are in use by universities are actually not very mobile friendly. So there is no mobile app and the benefits of a mobile app are that even if you turn the screen off, you can still continue listening when you're visiting a website on your mobile phone. Then when you turn the screen off, the audio might switch off. So that is definitely something to consider. And that is something where we would promote using open platforms and making educational material publicly available if it is at all possible. So what have you got so far? Think about the student learning journey. Adapt your learning material to make it so that you can create audio of it, create good text from it. We'll still talk more about the interaction. Well, let's talk about audio. Let's talk about audio then. So we have the text. So what do we do in terms of audio? One of the interesting parts that we found about audio was a bit of research. This paper, Good Sound, Good Research, How Audio Quality Influences Perceptions of Researcher, Research and Researcher by Aaron J. Newman and Norbert Schwartz. One of the quotes that we highlighted here was from an interview with Newman, I believe. As soon as we reduced the audio quality, all of a sudden, the scientists and their research lost credibility. So this is very interesting to me. I'm the audio nerd here, so I understand why this could be. This is also the case on video platforms where you know when the person uses really low audio quality, you will just tune away faster. Yeah, I think this is something to do with how much brain power you need to process what you're hearing versus actually understanding the material. So in terms of education, I think it's very important that the audio is very easy to listen to. Because if you're an auditory learner, then struggling with whether actually understanding the words is going to hamper your ability to understand the material. And in terms of audio, one of the things that I found really easy again with open source tools is how to make this audio. So in MK docs, you have the ability to embed HTML and HTML5, the standard that's now supported by every major browser actually includes bits where you can place audio in your Markdown document. So one of the things that I did was embedding the audio for each section. I recorded every single section, the same text that was there as text as an audio file as well. So students can simply play the audio instead of reading the audio if they so desired. They could of course also download the audio. So one of the audio editors in question is Audacity, one of my favorites. Even though our opinions differ here, but I do like Audacity quite a lot. There's also really good projects that try to make audio books out of Gutenberg and other publicly available books like LibriVox for example. And they do have scripts that you can use with Audacity to have the equalizer and everything done really well. You can reduce noise. You can use Audacity really, really well and it's free and it's open source. So I personally really, really like it. So one of the things that I think is underestimated in terms of audio and again that's the audio nerd talking is what kind of microphone you're using. And that's not necessarily the super expensive high-end microphones, but rather what kind of build you're using. And the important part here is that the microphone should be close to your mouth. So don't use Apple AirPods or don't use the headphones that plug into your phone because they will brush against your t-shirt. You can use your gaming headset. Yes, you can use your gaming headset or you can use any cheap headset that just works because the main point is that the microphone should be close to your mouth to minimize echo and that plays directly into audio quality. So the other thing that we for example did on a cheap build to improve the audio quality somewhat is to buy curtains in purple. In purple of course. In purple because visual. As you can see on the video during the Q&A session. So that's an interesting thing. It just reduces the echo in the room. Or another thing that you can also do is use your clothes. Do you have a clothes hanger? Just put up some clothes and that will immediately reduce the echo in the room that you're in. If you have a wardrobe or closet or anything like that, that's going to be your studio. Yeah, it's wonderful. You can just hide there. Or you can put bedsheets over yourself while recording. That works too. Yeah, I tried that but it gets really hot after a while. Microphone goes. Yeah. Anyway, so what about if you don't want to use any of these? What if audio is too much of a hassle for you? Let's say you're really concerned that your voice sample is going to get used by some bad people on the internet. Or you don't think your voice is up to scratch. That's also possible. Or maybe your pronunciation is just not that good or your English is not that good but you want your material to be in English. Then you can use text-to-speech. Thank you for listening to Microsoft SAM. No, that's not how it sounds today, right? No, it sounds a lot better than this today. Yes. I was actually surprised. We tested a bunch of text-to-speech engines and the text-to-speech engine that worked the best for us for educational material was the Microsoft Azure one. Unfortunately, not open source but for the amounts that you're probably going to be needing it for its free. There are open source variants but they're not as good. Yeah, they're not as good, unfortunately. But the Azure one is free for up to, I think, 5 million characters or something like that. So that should be more than enough for any sort of material that you're building. And it can generate audio files that are actually quite pleasant to listen to. So I definitely recommend giving that a look. So the text-to-speech is definitely optional. It is an opportunity to explore. It is easy to use. The thing that we have to consider here is that basically you will, if you change text a lot, then recording it every time is going to become a hassle. And we know that out of experience. Yeah. Because I was definitely cursing more than I was supposed to while I was recording my audio. Yeah. Sanya had to, unfortunately, endure that. So audio is easy. So let's talk about the hard parts. Visualization. Yeah. That's your topic. Is it? Yes. I just like it when it's done well. I don't like to actually do it. Well, that's why you're inventing some sort of an automated thing for it, right? Oh, I am. That's true. No, no. So visualization, unfortunately, is hard. The reason why it's hard is... First of all, you have to appeal to different targets. You have one target group. It's your students. But your students consist of genders, ages, socioeconomic factors, all kinds of things. There's actually a paper that I've used in research previously, which indicated that it wasn't meant to look at those factors at all. It was meant to look at infographics appeal. But it found out that there's a distinct difference between how women and men perceive visualizations. In terms of? In terms of complexity and colorfulness. So we won't go into detail here, but we will link the paper. And in general, what could be shown is that women prefer slightly more colorful visualizations and less complex visualizations. So let's say your class consists of half-half. You will have to look at the visualization that kind of satisfies both. Yeah. But also this is not... So let's make it absolutely clear. This is a very general observation, and depending on your target audience, your students, this might be different. Absolutely. And also you're not going to create tons of infographics. You're going to create visualizations to improve what you're saying in the text. So if you're doing something like we have on the slide here where we have, for example, explaining a network or something like that, that is perfectly understandable. It wouldn't count as infographic. No. It wouldn't count as a visualization that helps understand the context. My general observation from slide decks is that making them less complex in general helps people understand what you're trying to say. And also using colors in a very consistent manner also helps. But here you have to really pay attention to when you, for example, use red and green or any type of thing that you have to actually good contrast simply to improve accessibility. And not just contrast and look at color, all kinds of... No, I mean if you use, for example, light green and dark green, but someone's colorblind, it's going to be an issue. If you use red and green to show a difference in data flow, then someone who has got exact colorblindness of red and green is going to also run into trouble. The good thing is that there are now browser extensions that simulate various kinds of color deficiencies. So you can install those plugins and just simply look at your images. The other thing with visualizations is that don't just let your visualizations speak for themselves. Either provide alternative text or provide audio or provide an explanation in the text itself. That accompanies the image. And this is where actually going through the audio and at least listening to it or recording it yourself is very helpful. Because you can actually hear, okay, wait, there's a bit of context missing here that I'm only explaining in an image. That is not represented in the audio. And this is not just for people who cannot see and are using some sort of a screen reader. But this is also for people who are again on the go. For example, they're listening to your lecture from a car while driving. They will also not see your visuals. So visualizations are really for everyone, but they're going to be perceived differently. People with visual disabilities or something like that can still understand visualizations if you actually explain them in text very well. Yes. So let's say you have your slide deck you made it in LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, Google Slides, whatever. So how do you make a video out of it? Because that's something that a lot of students will prefer, syncing up the audio with the visuals. Again, we have a bunch of open source options, which is one your favorite. Yeah, Blender is my absolute favorite for video editing. It has a very steep learning curve, though. Yes. One of this, I didn't even know that Blender could do proper video editing as in the way that you would do it in an open shot, which is my open source tool of choice. But you actually can. So you can pull in your images, your PNG files that you exported from your slide deck and then sync it up with the audio. Yeah, you can mix it with effects, with actual videos, with visualizations. You can even create your own 3D models or import them from, let's say, Thingiverse. You can import them into Blender and then you can animate them if you learn how to do it. And you include that in a mix of your slides, for example. So Blender is really, really cool. Yeah, but it requires a crazy amount of commitment. Absolutely. Anyway, so what do you do with the video once it's done? You can, of course, upload it if your school provides a platform. You can upload it there. You can watch it yourself and forget to upload it and be really proud of finishing it. Yeah, that's definitely something you can do. But one of the things is, again, accessibility in terms of how your students can consume the content. If it's a platform that can only be accessed from the web browser, then that's going to hinder your students in consuming the content on the go or whatever else. So one of the things that I found out is that YouTube is a great platform to upload educational material, not just because it's free, but also because it gives you options to, for example, include timestamps to certain chapters of your video. And those chapters are easy to navigate from the video itself. And we're showing this on screen right now. The other thing that YouTube does really well is if you have your text, you can upload a simple text transcript of your audio and YouTube will automatically create closed captions for your video from that. So it will automatically detect the timing of which sentences said when and that will be automatically generated. You can then, of course, download the SRT file from YouTube and upload it to other platforms which don't have this feature as well if you want. So, okay, we're done. We have audio, we have video, we have text, we have everything. Okay, that's the end of it, right? No, it's not Janos. Why? What's missing? We have the interaction part that we still need. So we need to provide some interaction. We cannot just dump a list of materials into our students and then be done with it. We need to provide guidance. That's the leadership part of it. Oh, yeah? Yeah. We need to provide guidance. We need to allow them to ask questions in a way that... So normally after a class, you would probably go up to your teacher and ask questions if you dared. But you don't have a class now. You don't have a class now and you probably don't have one teacher anymore either. You probably have, let's say, a group or you... There is a way now to feel more closely connected to your institution where you're doing your education than before because a lot of people are now implementing instant messaging and other types of education. So education is changing quite a lot. What we need is interaction and a lot of people are implementing that. You did that in your course right now. So you, Slack, do you want to explain a bit more? Yeah, so Slack is the platform that we chose. And the reason why we chose Slack is because it is... I'm doing a course in IT. Slack is something that most people will probably be familiar with. And in terms of choosing a platform, Slack also met the criteria because we could hide the participants' email address and phone number so it wasn't readily available to everyone. It had channels so we could structure the communication around certain topics. It wasn't a single stream of endless messages. It has threads so when responding to someone, everybody had to follow every single conversation. And most importantly, when we did an announcement, then people could opt in to get an email when there was a message so they didn't have to constantly be online, which is one of my misgivings that I had with other chat platforms that are more mobile oriented like Telegram or WhatsApp because on those chat groups you just constantly have to be online otherwise you're missing what's going on. So that's a very important... There are of course alternatives. Which I would prefer. Which yes, so one of the things that we personally use is Discord. Discord has a couple of features that Slack doesn't. For example, Discord automatically subscribes everyone to every channel and they have to turn it off, which makes it easier to manage channels later on. It also has Slack... So actually delete versus just in Slack where you only deactivate? Yes, so deletion is much easier in Discord. But of course, there is also other options like Mattermost, which you have to host yourself. And the... I like Riots slash using anything Matrix. They have renamed themselves now. Yeah, so in general my suggestion would be use something with channels, use something that's privacy focused at least to the level of that your phone number isn't publicly available. Avoid mobile focused instant messengers. And I would also urge to avoid forums in educational platforms like Model, not for the interactive part. Because you have email. So you don't need something else that is async, but you need something where people feel like they can write. I would still suggest something where DMs direct messages aren't really encouraged, but rather use public communication, connect to each other. Because you always deal with the negative side effects of DMs. Yeah, we also had students help each other. So even before myself or the other lecturer got to it to answering the students helped each other. So public messages are very helpful in that. The other thing that is very interesting and very helpful to students is consulting calls. Because instant messaging doesn't do everything, right? Oh yeah, so you need consultation calls, something like you are available. It's like office hours. Some people, for example, some managers in companies have office hours where people from their team, people from other teams can come and ask questions. Do you have specific questions regarding the material? Do you have specific questions regarding the course in general? Do you have specific questions regarding the institution, your overall course that you're following? There should definitely be a way where people can connect with you without feeling that you're not going to answer their email, you're not going to look at their email, but where you're just available. Yeah, so these consultation calls also provide a great opportunity for you to give some additional context to the learning material. In my case it was, for example, the last time a demonstration in something called Kubernetes, which they don't have to specifically learn, but it's also still interesting to them. So that's a bit of an icebreaker to get people to ask questions that are not directly related to the material that's being presented. And apart from that, of course, there's always going to be questions, especially if you do project work or something like that. So we're looking forward to meet you in the questions. But wait, so we have something for you as well. That's true, we actually have something for you. So what can you do now? We talked a lot about theory and what you could or should do. We have something for you. We have created a blueprint for MKDocs that you can use. This is a blueprint that you can copy on GitHub and then customize to your liking, input your educational material and just generally use. And now we're looking forward to meeting you in the questions section. Thank you very much for listening and let's hear what you have to ask about this. Thank you, bye-bye, looking forward to meeting you. See you soon.