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A comment on Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire. Parent comment

Re:Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learnin... by bsder on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @04:50PM (#23910859)
> Having an entire production team at the ready?

THIS. So much.

Having just done an online talk, I can tell you that the audio-visual stuff was BY FAR the most annoying.

More expensive webcam, add way more lighting to my office, get an expensive lavalier mic (highly recommended for lectures--earphones with boom mics drive me nuts as the monitoring has enough delay to be annoying--probably could remove that with a $500 audio interface that has DSP monitoring), learn OBS, realize my laptop has nowhere near the power necessary to drive OBS, build a new Desktop machine outfitted for video (that barely even notices OBS), relearn OBS now that it works beautifully, realize that I don't know even a fraction of OBS but have to get things done, record the lecture, and finally have it presented in potato-cam because the people running the thing have laptops with less power than mine and can't playback the hi-res video I sent them.

The lecture maybe took 40 hours to do. Maybe.

The A/V--probably 120+ hours. And probably will take another 120+ the next round because I'll be more capable with the tools.

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Re:Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learnin... by akman on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @06:26PM (#23911648)
This begs to normalized and sold as a package for both providers and consumers.
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Re:Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learnin... by bsder on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @02:38AM (#23914518)
The problem is that this effectively requires that you set up all the equipment in a place and make people come to that.

Not a great thing in the middle of Covid.

However, once Covid passes, perhaps WeWork should try this with all their real estate to avoid going bankrupt.

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Re:Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learnin... by akman on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @03:46PM (#23920807)
That's an interesting idea with WeWork.

I'd think that despite variations in environments in a home, there are either 1) enough accommodating tools to normalize (e.g., lights that have a variety of settings) or 2) the majority of the processes required to handle the variations are figured out (e.g., in consistently poor lighting, you need package B instead of package A).

I see some hardware packages for home studios going on sale, but nothing to the level of hardware/software integration necessary for the most effective online instruction/discussion.

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