Within Canvas, there are several external programs you can use to start a virtual classroom (synchronous online meeting rooms). ML instructors have access to alternative external software platforms---BlueJeans (BJ), Adobe Connect (AC) and Blackboard Collaborate (BC). You only need to use one of them, but one platform can be used as a back up for the other just in case.

• BlueJeans (BJ)
  • BJ can run as a browser-based add-in program or run as a stand-alone app. This is what GT recommends for all synchronous meetings.
  • Lately, BJ's screen-sharing capabilities are improving. It can now support video and audio sharing in real time. For example, you can share screen of a Powerpoint file (pptx file only) with recorded audio or a browser page with embedded video or audio. If you have not updated your BJ lately, please reinstall it to take advantage of these new capabilities.
    
    
• Adobe Connect (AC)
  • AC can run as a browser-based add-in program or run as a stand-alone app. This is a program licensed to a small number of units on campus (IAC and other units like LI). Contact IAC tech support or Chaohua (cou@gatech.edu) of CETL to inquire the availability of a host account.
  • If you use a Mac, you can go to any streaming video Website such as Youtube and play its video without pre-uploading video files to AC. If you just play a streaming video, it will be streamed smoothly to your students in real time. This feat is not possible for Windows computers. If you are a Windows user, please pre-upload video files and use "Share Documents" option to share real-time streaming video.
  • If you need to share what's already being screen-shared in the main room within each of the breakout rooms automatically, AC is the only one that allows it.
    
    
• Blackboard Collaborate (BC)
  • The version of BC linked to Canvas is a browser-based, add-in program. There is a separate stand-alone app of BC called "Blackboard Collaborate Ultra," but this is not available through Canvas.
  • The BC link in Canvas is not available if your course site is created as QUP subaccount (Section QUP). For further information on how to set up BC, see: How to set up Blackboard Collaborate.pptx.
  • Once you join the session in BC, detach the browser tab showing BC and make it an independent window. If you don't do this, screen sharing of browser window will embed a BC window within a BC window within a BC window....recursively. You'll know it because it looks crazy.
    

Other synchronous meeting software. These services are not officially approved by GT.

• Zoom
• Google Meet
• GoToMeeting

• Welcome to Virtual Classroom.pptx (This is a sample Powerpoint presentation file you can modify to suit your own first virtual class and upload to your Adobe Connect platform.)
  
  
• Here is a sample Adobe Connect Classroom

Additional tips to set up an synchronous online course:

• If you are planning to use AC, contact helpdesk@iac.gatech.edu to receive your own Adobe Connect host account. You only need to do this once. You can reuse the same AC meeting room over multiple semesters. If you are planning to use BC, the tool link should be available within the Canvas courtse site (Section UA). If you don't see it, contact canvas@gatech.edu.
  
  
• When scheduling a synchronous, conversational class, make sure the maximum number of students per class is 12 or less. Our experience shows that the current synchronous technology will not be able to handle a larger class size well. The issues include disconnection issues, student voice input issues and general performance lags. These issues are likely to happen most frequently during the first week of the semester and students will drop your class if their interactive experience is not very positive.
  
  
• If your class is primarily lecture-oriented with only occasional student oral-aural responses, you can have a larger synchronous class.
  
  
• For synchronous online classes, it's important to make announcements a few times before the first online meeting of your class. Here is a sample announcement.
  
  
• During the first few weeks, make sure you repeat the steps to take when student experience difficulties such as:
  
  
  • Voice input issues: Make sure to connect the headset BEFORE the browser is started and select the audio recording and playback devices correctly in the control panel. (If you connect the headset after your browser is started, Adobe Connect may not recognize your audio device.)
    
    
  • If the correct audio recording/playback devices are selected but Adobe Connect does not work, immediately exit Adobe Connect and quit the browser. Check your audio devices in the Control Panel again and restart the browser. (If this does not work, restart your computer. By restarting the computer, most of the audio issues are corrected automatically as long as headset is connected.)
    
    
  • If you get disconnected from Adobe Connect, simply reenter the room as soon as possible.

• What type of computer hardware is best?
  
  
  • If you require students to submit handwritten homework electronically (Here's a sample instruction), it's best to have a tablet PC with a stylus or at least an external drawing tablet with a stylus. An external drawing tablet is clunkier and more difficult to manage than a tablet PC.
    
    
  • If you have a tablet PC or an external drawing tablet, you can use a freehand drawing tool to correct student's homework electronically without printing anything. (You can use a freehand drawing tool with the mouse or trackpad but with less precision of course.)
    
    
  • A tablet PC can give you better precision than an external drawing tablet can (unless the external tablet comes with its own screen).
    
    
  • Always use a headset with a microphone (USB type is the best). Do not use built-in speakers and microphone. They tend to create feedback echo problems. (If a headset is not available or broken, a built-in microphone if any can be used temporarily. Absolutely no built-in speakers must be used. Use an earphone if available instead.)
    

It is frustrating when your connection to virtual classroom (Adobe Connect, Blackboard Collaborate, Zoom, etc.) is suddenly disrupted during the class and students (and even the instructor) start to get disconnected frequently to the point when the normal classroom is no longer possible. A typical reaction is "It was working fine until yesterday." Synchronous classroom will feel the disruptions when the Internet connection is intermittent. Asynchronous classroom (Web browsing) does not feel anything even if the internet connection is intermittent.

In one semester, nothing like this may happen and everything works fine throughout the semester. In the next semester, everyone suddenly experiences disruptions (disconnections and lags) for a few hours but nothing else happens for the rest of the semester. Whether this will happen or not in a given semester is totally unpredictable. Usually, the problems disappear completely by the time you contact your tech support and explain the issue. (Your tech support usually cannot track down what happened or what caused the disruptions.)

The problem may be on the GT campus network side or on the virtual classroom server side. GT may be adjusting some security/firewall settings on campus during the time of disruption. If this happens, the Internet may still be connected (you can browse any Websites), but people on campus (students and instructors) using a virtual classroom program will be affected (frequent disconnections and long delays in rejoining the session in progress). It might affect only those who connect on campus without affecting those who connect off campus. (FYI: I had more connectivity issues on campus than at home.)

If the virutal classroom server side has issues, this will affect everyone---both on-campus and off-campus people alike. In this case, if you normally use Adobe Connect (AC), you can switch to Blackboard Collaborate (BC) to continue the virtual classroom on that day. If you normally use BC, you can switch to AC. Hopefully, not both platforms suffer the connectivity issues at the same time. Make sure you have URL links to both meeting rooms before the semester starts. Read How to set up Adobe Connect.pptx and How to set up Blackboard Collaborate.pptx for further information.

If both platforms have the same connectivity issues, the GT network is likely to be the reason, not the platforms. Without doing anything, the issues are likely to disappear completely in the next class.

A regular classroom on campus is not allowed to be used to conduct virtual classrooms. In order to conduct a virtual classroom while you are on campus and if you share your office with other faculty members, you need to reserve Instructional Studio (Savant 310e next to Swann). This room has an iMac and a PC. Both have video recording capabilities and tools to support online classes.

Please do not use your office (if you share it with others) to conduct your virtual classroom. This is to avoid disturbing others in the same room as well as being disturbed by them. If your home has broadband Internet connection, you can conduct your virtual classroom from home, too.

Savant 310e is a quiet, cozy room (max. occupant: 1). Currently, it is reserved on first-come, first-served basis using the Calendar tool of your Office 365. Please see this instruction to reserve it. If there are overlapping synchronous online courses that require the studio, course scheduling needs to be coordinated among the affected instructors before each semester.

If you have any questions regarding the Online Instructional Studio, please email helpdesk@iac.gatech.edu and a ticket will be created.

• Canvas comes with a primitive freehand drawing tool within the Speed Grader tool. Speed Grader's drawing tool does not have the "undo" last stroke option. That is, if you are drawing a complex character or marking something by hand, and if you make one wrong stroke, the only choice you have is either to accept everything or to delete everything you have drawn up to that point.
  
  
• Frequently, student's file may not be vertically aligned (i.e., appears sideways). Speed Grader in Canvas does not have an option to rotate the file.
  
  
• If you would like to use a freehand drawing tool to grade student homework electronically, it's better to download it first (right-click + "Save the link as") and use Adobe Acrobat (Pro DC version or higher recommended). Adobe Acrobat allows you to correct the file orientation before using the drawing tool.
  
  
• When adding comments to individual scores in "Grades," make sure you click on the "Post Comment" button. If you just click "Update Grade" without clicking "Post Comment," you will lose the comment. (This is probably a bug in Canvas.)
  
  
• Extremely Important: When you create a quiz using the Canvas Quiz tool, make sure to click on BOTH "Update Question" after each modification to the question AND "Save" at the bottom of the page. If you just click on "Save" without clicking on "Update Question" before it, Canvas will discard those updates. (FYI: When you update and preview the quiz, Canvas will show you the updated version of the questions, but this is misleading.) Canvas uses whatever the last saved version instead. The last saved version is older than the updated version if you forget to click on the "Save" button at the bottom of quiz editing screen. Canvas will not give you any warning about unsaved updates to the quiz. (I consider this to be bugs in Canvas.)

If you need accurate freehand markup of student work, we recommend a combination of a tablet PC with a stylus and Adobe Acrobat (More reliable than Draw Tools of MS Office).

• In order to streamline written homework submissions, create a guideline for printing, handwriting answers, scanning, merging scanned images into a single PDF and uploading to Canvas. Here is a sample guideline.
  
  
• If you require submission of Word or Powerpoint files that contain non-Western-alphabet fonts and you need to print them as a PDF for marking up, ask students to "embed the fonts into the Word/Powerpoint file" when they save the file (File > Options > Save > Embed fonts in the file). If students forget to do this and the file contains non-standard, non-Western alphabetic font that does not exist in the instructor's computer, printing/saving such a file as a PDF will generate an error message as shown below and no PDF can be created.
  
  

  %%[ ProductName: Distiller ]%% %%[Page: 1]%% Gungsuh not found, using Courier. %%[ Error: typecheck; OffendingCommand: xshow ]%% Stack: [200 200 200 199 200 0] (w·…“Ä) %%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%% %%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

  
  To avoid this error, the instructor needs to do the following:
  
  
  1. Before printing the file as PDF, open the "Printer Properties" dialog box and unclick the "Rely on system fonts only; do not use document fonts" option.
     
     If this still causes an error message like the one above, do the following.
     
     
  2. Open the Word or Powerpoint file in question.
     
     
  3. Select everything (Ctrl-A) in the Word file. (If the offending font is used in a Powerpoint file, you may have to repeat the following on every slide.)
     
     
  4. When the entire text is selected, select the closest font your computer has (e.g., Gungsuh → MSGothic). By doing this, you are replacing the offending font with the font your computer has.
     
     
  5. Now print/save the file as a PDF.
     
     

Some students have access only to a non-Windows device. Some devices such as Apple's iPad/iPhone or Mac computers saves the file in a format (For example, .pages or .heic files) Windows computers cannot open or students may not know how to export their files to a Windows-friendly format. If students upload a homework file that the instructor cannot open, there is a Web-based file conversion service such as Zamzar (https://www.zamzar.com/). For example, Zamzar can convert iPad's ".pages" file into other format like MSWord's ".docx." Some file format like ".heic" cannot be handled by Zamzar Website. You need a Mac to open these files.

In order to see what format the students have saved their files as, the instructor must enable their computer to show the file extension. See How to show file extensions in Windows for more information.