Today, Tracy and Eleanor gave a lightning talk as part of the Art of the Possible series. We shared our recent work with 3D and virtualising spaces, as well as using technology for interactive teaching when students can’t all be Present in Person.
Resources and links from the session are available below. Some may only be accessible to Newcastle University staff.
This post is about the use of Menti – a pretty polling tool that can show responses in real time on screen. Lindsey Ferrie used this to gather student feedback during an in-person event. Link to guides included.
In Biomedical, Nutritional and Sport Sciences this year there is a focus on improving assessment and feedback. Including student voice in this development work is key. As well as the normal routes for student voice, such as staff-student committees and module evaluation forms, there were certain questions that staff had in mind which could reveal a lot about how students were feeling about this aspect of their course.
The formal module evaluation forms don’t always capture a large sample from the student body, and as with any survey, generating a high response rate is very difficult, and can sometimes end up only revealing the most polarised responses. Informal live response tools were a potential way to gather large amounts of more representative data, as well as demonstrating that feedback is wanted, heard, and acted upon within a shorter cycle. It is also much more convenient to capture a response immediately when students are in the room.
Having seen Menti in use during the FMS TEL Conference, the decision was taken to try it out in a much bigger setting – the inductions for all programmes in the School. Overall, this includes around 1500 students.
A useful aspect of Menti in this situation was the capacity to provide a wide range of question types, as well as the ability to see answers as they are coming in. Naturally, this has some disadvantages too – students’ responses may be coloured by what they see on screen if this is displayed. Possibly due to its anonymous nature, students provided some genuinely challenging feedback which proved very useful.
When in use, Menti allowed for the sessions to be more interactive as sharing live responses is quite immersive. It also allowed for the presenters to directly react and respond to things as they came in and broke the ice between students and staff. This can be useful for quick questions about content as well as student voice activities, for example polling the level of understanding of a concept at the start and end of a teaching session.
In terms of providing evidence to share with other colleagues, or at committees, Menti retains the responses for you to review, and can generate lists of entered comments. It isn’t designed as a statistical analysis tool, so comments don’t come in a convenient format for analysis. Graphs can be screenshotted for simple sharing if needed. It is of course possible to read through the comments and type up an overview of common themes yourself if needed.
The instant feedback received highlighted that some students weren’t entirely satisfied with the feedback they were receiving on their lab reports. Based on the responses, the School was able to put on a dedicated feedback session to further explore this, and to find out what could be improved, and have already been able to implement some changes.
You can create a free account on Mentimeter.com. This free account has limits on how many individual questions you can make, but you can always make multiple presentations and switch to them when sharing your screen. The university does not have any subscription to this service. As such, do not ask students to input any personal or sensitive information as this won’t be covered by our data policies.
When presenting, simply ask the audience to visit the site and enter the provided code that you show on the screen. When you’re ready, you can display the results to your audience. See the FMS TEL Community for a full walkthrough.
Lindsey Ferrie, Senior Lecturer, School of Biomedical, Nutritional and Sport Sciences
This post shows how cursor movement can be used in online presentations to show gesture, and the skills needed to add motion tracked items to video.
As part of the recently launched Exploring 3D Anatomy MOOC, two video presentations were created. These presentations involved explaining diagrams and pictures. One of these recordings had a moving cursor which the presenter had used to explain various parts of the screen, and the other was recorded without a cursor. To improve the clarity of the explanations, we had a request to display a larger cursor over the recorded material, using it to ‘point’ to the various significant areas shown.
When you’re planning a virtual presentation it’s worth checking if and how the software handles the cursor – some software will use a glowing highlight as you present, some will show and hide the cursor automatically depending on when you move it. The videos were recorded in ReCap, which automatically hides the cursor unless it is moving. The end of the post has links to various guides to help you choose your settings. The rest of this post details the animation process for how a larger cursor was added after the presentations had been recorded. This technique could be applied to other added graphical elements too if needed.
As the cursor is used in a lot of animations, there was already a scalable vector graphic image of a cursor available to use. This had been drawn in Adobe Illustrator. The next step was to use After Effects to add the cursor to the video and animate it.
For the video with the cursor visible, the motion tracking function of After Effects was used. After identifying the original cursor, the new larger cursor was set to track it. Here and there the original cursor changed colour to remain visible over different backgrounds. It wasn’t necessary to replicate the colour change with the larger cursor, but this colour change did add extra steps when setting up the motion tracking as it needed to be started afresh each time the original cursor had changed colour. For the video without the cursor, the process was simpler as there was nothing to hide or track. As such the animations could be set up from scratch. Based on the clear explanation from the presenter, it was possible to add a cursor to trace the areas being explained.
The animations were set up to take place between certain moments of the video – like scenes. Key points in the video were identified and ‘key frames’ added which allow us to set up when certain animations should take place, and how long for. Simple animations such as changing size, position or rotation can be done relatively quickly using these linear key frames.
Once the start and end points are set, further customisation can be done to change the feel of the animation. For example, in this case, the speed of the cursor should somewhat mimic a natural movement rather than a precisely uniform speed. Using ‘ease in’ and ‘ease out’ (combined as ‘easy ease’) allows for the animation to look a little more natural, and less jarring, as the cursor starts to move more slowly before speeding up and gradually slowing to a stop.
When moving from point to point it’s very rare that a straight line is the best path to take, usually a slightly curved path can help add a more natural-looking movement. This might be used to instruct a viewer to click a series of buttons, for example. The ‘spatial interpolation’ in After Effects allows for the path of the moving object to be linear (a straight line) or Bezier (curved). The temporal interpolation tool allows for variations to the speed of the movement – a more customisable version of easing. Adjusting these allows for a nice natural pace and movement, and for more creative effects. For example an item moving from A to B may move slowly at first, then speed up towards the middle of its journey, then slow down again before arriving at its final destination – imagine a train travelling between stations!).
The final videos allowed for a clear approximation of gesture to be added to the presentations, mimicking how a presenter might usually point to a screen or demonstrate a movement. While this is something very natural to do in person, you may need to think more about how you use and move your cursor in online presenting. Often it can be tricky to see the cursor, so you may wish to consider moving it more slowly than usual if you are using it to indicate processes or changes. Selecting some form of pointer or cursor highlighting in your chosen software can improve the visibility of the cursor during your presentation, whether recording or in person. On the other hand, you may wish to put your mouse out of reach so that random or accidental cursor movements don’t detract from your content.
This video demonstrates the full motion tracking procedure, showing how you can track an object and then map the position of a cursor to it.
