Online Tools for Education: Piazza Student Forums

Piazza provides forums for students. When helping with teaching this has been typically used for teachers to send out announcements, and for students to ask questions, typically about administration of a course, rather than the content. Like Slack, Piazza can be confusing, with messages popping up in different forums. A particular annoyance are the semi-anonymous posts. This is used so that students do not feel so reluctant to ask a question. However, I am training professionals, who need to learn to seek information from colleagues.

Online Tools for Education: Discord for Harmony?

Discord is an audio chat system intended for video gamers. The idea, as far as I understand it, is that you play a game together, while talking via Discord. About the only useful feature I can see, from an educational point of view, is that Discord allows for telephone quality speech, which uses much less bandwidth than the video conferencing systems.

Online Tools for Education: Slack is Demanding But Usable

Currently I am mentoring a team in the  Australian Computer Society's Flatten the Curve hackathon, to develop prototypes in 48 hours to counter the  COVID-19 Coronavirus. Participants have until 6pm, to demonstrate a working product, or at least an idea of what it could do. This is the first purely online hackerthon I have been involved with. Previous ones have been at one venue, or at a number of networked venues. It is challenging to work with organizers, fellow mentors, and a team, who I have only ever see on screen.  The primary tool being used is Slack, an instant messaging platform. This is the largest scale use of Slack I have been involved with. 

Previously I have helped teach teams of ANU TechLauncher students who use Slack to coordinate their project. But there each team operates independently. Here Slack is being used by all teams and organizers. There are almost a hundred channels, and I am following a dozen of them. I have to be careful who the audience is in each channel, as there are ones just for mentors, and others the participants read.

One surprise was that Slack, usually text based, also does video conferences. The audio quality is not as good as I have found with Zoom, and it seems to use twice as much bandwidth, but it is conveniently integrated with the forums. I got so comfortable with the integration that I was sitting in Slack wondering where everyone was, and then realized this particular meeting was happening in Zoom. I then had to scramble to find the details.

Blended Learning Challenge for the ACS Flatten the Curve Hackathon

The Australian Computer Society is running a Flatten the Curve hackathon, to develop prototypes in 48 hours to counter the  COVID-19 Coronavirus. Registration closes 3:30 pm 9 April, and the event starts at 9pm. The challenge I have submitted is Blended Learning for a gradual return to campus, and so if there is a further outbreak of disease online learning can be quickly implemented. This will require tools, teacher training, and changes to government policy.