Late image processing Monday update

I was busy Monday evening with the image processing university course that I’m helping to teach. It was the first lecture to be followed by actual exercises for the students to do, which is the part I’m helping with. I spent much of the afternoon preparing by going through the exercises myself, and teaching myself a bit of Matlab at the same time.

The lecture part was good, with close to 200 students joining in on a Zoom meeting. Then we split up into teams of 5 students, each team with two assigned tutors to assist them. For this we used Microsoft Teams, where the lecturer had assigned each group to a separate team within the app. I had to jump between several teams to see if the students needed help and then assist them.

The problem I had was that several of the teams started voice chats to discuss the exercises. I tried joining one and was initially muted. I hit the unmute button and started talking… and after a while someone in the Zoom meeting said that I was talking there to all 200 students! I placed the MS Teams and Zoom windows so I could see both on my screen. I hit the unmute button in MS Teams, and I saw that Zoom also indicated I was unmuted there. Zoom was responding to mouse clicks and keyboard commands that should only have gone to MS Teams!

So I had no way of unmuting myself in MS Teams without also unmuting in Zoom! After a few minutes I had to shut down Zoom so that I could use voice chat in MS Teams. But even after I’d done this, the unmute function started to work intermittently in Teams – sometimes I’d start talking, thinking I was unmuted, but they couldn’t hear me, and sometimes they could. It was incredibly frustrating.

So I spent most of the time just using the text chat feature in MS Teams to provide assistance to the students. I’ll have to look into the muting function and see if I can work out what’s going on, and why there’s a weird interaction with Zoom. By the end of the hour assigned for the exercises, I felt like I’d been useful for several of the teams, so that was good at least.

With the class ending at 9pm I neglected to write this up and just wound down before bed time.

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3 thoughts on “Late image processing Monday update”

  1. Use a Teams webinar, and you can just split the room into subrooms without using a different app. Skip Zoom entirely, if you also have to use Teams.

    Signed,
    Carl “uses Teams a lot at work” Fink

    1. Thanks, though I don’t have the option to do any of that – I’m not the one running the course. We also need the subteams permanently set up so that students can ask questions through the week. I’m not if what you’re suggesting would support that (maybe it does).

  2. Since it sounds like you are less actively involved in the lecture, one temporary solution might be to zoom on a different device like a phone or tablet. Then use teams on your computer. At least until you can figure it out.

    I used teams in my classes all last year and found it to be super glitchy and frustrating. Oh well. Good luck!

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