Education during Covid

The majority of lecturers are trying very hard to adjust to new forms of teaching and it is often as difficult for them as it is for the students. But some approaches are better than others, and in one subject I had to put in considerable effort just to get the material into a digestible format.

Some professors decided to hold the lectures digitally not via live video conferencing, or prerecorded videos, but by adding audio commentary to their Microsoft Powerpoint slides. Not only can I not open them on Linux because Libreoffice completely scrambles all the elements on each page (and I refuse to touch Microsofts cloud stuff), it seems that even if you use the actual Powerpoint software you can't make it so that the next slide shows automatically after an audio track has ended. So you need to wait in silence for a few seconds to make sure the professor finished speaking before manually going to the next slide.

Maybe I'm being unnecessarily picky here but I can't study like this. So what I did was write a script that extracts the audio tracks from the .ppt files, checks what slide they appear on and in which order by reading the XML (not all slides have audio, and some have multiple tracks) and stitches it together with images from the pdf files of the presentations we were thankfully also provided with (otherwise there would have been no way around Powerpoint for me) to create videos using ffmpeg. This project took a lot of trial and error and I would rather have used that time to study the material, but oh well. I shared the results with my fellow students of course, so even if it took much longer than I would have liked I call it a success if it saved time and energy for enough other people.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. Since that project is done I need other ways to procrastinate so I'm posting about it here.

eaterofsheep

>Libreoffice completely scrambles all the elements on each page

Oh yes, I know your pain well! I was doing an online German test - it was under strict time conditions, only had 10 or 15 minutes. To my horror, I downloaded the file and well, Libreoffice scrambled everything. The text made references to pictures that had been accidentally covered up by text boxes, things were all a bit out of order, had to rearrange and reinterpret half of it on top of doing the test itself. There were lines I was supposed to write on, but writing on those lines caused everything else to shift out of place again. I don't think I did myself justice on the test, but I comfortably passed the module - all's well that ends well.

edisondotme

This reminds me of the convoluted stuff Jewish people do to avoid "working" on Shabbat. Except in this case instead of work, it's zealous dedication to FLOSS ha

pseudoriemann

Well preferring FLOSS was part of the motivation but I tried it out in Powerpoint and even there I did not have the ability to play the presentations out like a movie. You had to click on icons scattered on the slides to start each audio commentary track, which was too distracting for me. So even on Windows with a full Microsoft Office I'd have had to do the same thing. Maybe it would work the way I expect it to on some newer Powerpoint versions than I tried it on but I didn't want to bother going down that route. But I'm doubtful it would have been able to tell in which order to play the comments, and even then I'm sure it wouldn't be able to tell me how long each presentation is in total, which I need to know if I want to make a study plan. So the FLOSS way was simply more powerful and convenient for me (the end product at least), and not just better in a purely idealistic sense.

kyle

Reading this post makes me very happy: it reminds me of my university times. The challenges were different, but the spirit is just the same: software freedom.

I could go on talking about what hacks we had to bypass in order to avoid undesirable software, but perhaps it would be boring.

What I will tell is that:

1. You're *not* wasting your time, as you're working for your freedom.

2. Even if freedom wasn't important, you're still not wasting your time: working around stupid limitations is what gives you experience, and there's always demand for it.

3. The battle is never over. I know a dude who wrote a whole bunch of scripts to convert microsoft-outlook-365-whatever-the-f*ck to text. And he did that during working hours, because it allows him to be more efficient.

With that I'm not saying that procrastination is good, but creativity and working around microsoft shit is the true mark of the hacker.

pseudoriemann

Thanks for the encouragement! I have never been called a hacker before (even though I have used the command line in public) so I will take this as a badge of honor.

I definitely learned some things by doing this side quest, mainly that tinkering with video/audio programmatically can be much more tricky than one might think. It was very annoying to get things working but I'm glad I did it in the end.

Sadly not all software freedom related problems can be circumvented by hacks. The biggest issue is that the majority of important discussion among my fellow students is done via WhatsApp groups...

kyle

Sadly not all software freedom related problems can be circumvented by hacks. The biggest issue is that the majority of important discussion among my fellow students is done via WhatsApp groups...

This is very annoying. Back then we used to have a mailing lists.

Have you tried this thing, btw?

kyle@saturn$ apt info yowsup-cli
Package: yowsup-cli
Version: 3.2.3-2
Priority: optional
Section: net
Source: yowsup
Maintainer: Josue Ortega <josue@debian.org>
Installed-Size: 57.3 kB
Depends: python3:any, python3-yowsup, python3-protobuf (>= 3.6.0), python3-pil
Homepage: https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup
Download-Size: 21.0 kB
APT-Manual-Installed: yes
APT-Sources: http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye/main amd64 Packages
Description: command line tool that acts as WhatsApp client
 WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform mobile messaging app which allows
 you to exchange messages, via Internet, without having to pay for SMS,
 using a mobile phone.
 .
 In addition to basic messaging, WhatsApp users can create groups, send
 each other unlimited images, video and audio media messages.
 .
 yowsup-cli is a command line program, based in python-yowsup library, that
 allows you to login and use the WhatsApp service, providing all capabilities
 of an official WhatsApp client, as encryption of messages. This program can
 be used for multiple purposes as e.g. to receive messages from network servers
 or appliances, notifying about issues, via direct command or by special agents
 (Zabbix, Nagios, iwatch, portsentry, etc.).
 .
 This package is a good example of the python-yowsup library implementation.

pseudoriemann

Oh this looks interesting, thank you! This would solve one half of my problems with WhatsApp. The other half is that I need to register with a phone number, perhaps it is time to get another cheap SIM card...

kyle

If it turns out to be helpful, please let me know: I wouldn't dislike the idea of getting rid of whatsapp and turning it into a script...

fish-fingerer

I sympathise. I'm a lecturer, and it's awful for us too. We increasingly don't get a choice how we upload our lectures. My university forces us to do it all via Teams. We aren't allowed to host our own sites and make our slides and notes available for all. It is incredibly short sighted and drives me mad; but we have been *told*.

Even when you do try and lecture... its just a wall of camera off webcams and you have no idea if you're even connected to the students or they're listening or if they've switched off. At least in the old days you could see if everyones eyes were on their laptops instead of the talk. Now it's just ... awful.

Share the tools you write! I've never met a lecturer who didn't enjoy circumventing stupid bureaucratic rules... and if we can help share tools with our students to help them get the material in a way that works for them that's a win for us. We think our subjects are cool... we want to share our love for them with you... anything that helps us do it is a win!

pseudoriemann

I really do feel the pain of my lecturers when they feel like they are talking into the void... I tried my best to give signs of life when I could but it could never replace being in the same room. Thank you for your efforts to teach even in such difficult circumstances!

While I do not like Teams at all, I do see some value in a unified platform for lectures. At my university every class is taught differently and one can quickly lose the overview of where to find what. But it should be an open source platform that supports all modes of teaching, and with no restrictions to where else material is provided. I am curious, do these rules come from the heads of the universities or from politicians?

I would share my code if it weren't extremely hacky and had applications in more than one place! I think the recommendation to add audio commentary to Powerpoint slides came from above too, but it was only actually done like that in one class. There were also many manual steps involved, so I think just sharing the results benefited everyone the most.

nargran

I feel you there. I had so many issues with Microshit Teams in GNU+Linux (in the browser of course, I wouldn't give superuser privileges to a M$ installer). Some professors were understanding, but most weren't at all and went with the "it works in my machine" logic. I ended up installing an ubuntu based distro with Chrome on an USB drive so I could use it without installing Chrome. A very sad and frustrating state of affairs.

pseudoriemann

That sounds tough too. I'm glad I was spared with Microsoft Teams. Zoom is perhaps not much better, and for a long time I resisted installing it too, until I almost missed an exam because as the only browser user I somehow couldn't connect. So now I have Zoom installed in a flatpak. At least emotionally I can endure that better than having to sign up for a Microsoft account, even if the consequences are probably not much different.

Thankfully Linux usage is relatively common among professors in my department so they were usually understanding about most issues. One class was even held over Jitsi, but it had technical problems with screen sharing so next semester he switched over to Zoom (which had other issues but apparently less severe.)

I wish universities would just host their own Jitsi servers and give direct support to lecturers when there are problems. Why is our education tied to accepting the terms and conditions of some tech giant in the US? Mine hosts an internal PeerTube instance for prerecorded lectures but not everyone uses it.

nargran

I wish universities would just host their own Jitsi servers

Yes, or other similar libre option. I wrote some mails to people at my uni in charge of that (to question, for example, whether our Teams accounts are legal under GDPR or not, because the university made them for us without our consent (!!!)). They told me not to worry about privacy because "Teams" (that is, Microsoft) "follows the regulations". That's basically saying nothing and doesn't address my concerns.

I also pointed out that there are some students in our university from countries in bad relationship with the US that could even be in danger if forced to use a product by a company with close ties to the US three letter agencies. For example, according to the numbers the university publishes, there are several dozens of students from Iran and even three from North Korea.

Something funny and sad at the same time is that while the department of education of th regional government has their own jitsi for primary and secondary education, and schools are forbidden from using different, private services, their servers were overwhelmed at the beginning of the pandemic and teachers were angrily protesting not being able to use Teams, Zoom or Hangouts instead and saying that the regional government "feared private competition to their product" (which isn't even a product).

Okay, /rant for now

pseudoriemann

It's sad how badly people react to very sensible data protection measures. I hope the Jitsi servers could be upgraded to handle the traffic.

Meanwhile my country decided it was a good idea to force Teams upon all students from primary to high school. I really don't know what I would have done had I still been in school, but I feel like temporarily dropping out would have been on the table.

Well, many of my professors opted for Zoom (we also all got accounts assigned automatically, I agree that that is very questionable under GDPR) and it might be just as bad as Teams. But at least Zoom accounts aren't also linked to a thousand other services so I somehow managed to swallow that pill.

I will never understand how nonchalantly private information gets outsourced to the US without anyone questioning it. But complaining about it too much is bad for my health so I will also stop this rant again :)

fish-fingerer

At least in the UK we're not allowed to much anymore. Everything seems like it has to be hosted on Microsoft's cloud, and we're not allowed to self host (our IT departments are actively searching for our hidden servers and telling us off).

There is fight back against it (at least at my uni), but it is coming from the top. It is incredibly short sighted.

fish-fingerer

It gets worse with things like git.

IT says all research data must be secured in OneDrive... but onedrive doesn't cope with filenames beginning with . (like the .git folder) or the millions of files in it. It also borks the permissions, so we have to enable a bunch of options to comply. We're not allowed to use github or an external forge (its not secure in onedrive they say)... we're not allowed to host and secure our own. So what are you gonna do? Half the groups put it on github anyway... a few more run there own servers but hide them from IT. Utterly insane. If it was confidential, dangerous, or private data id be okay with it but half the time its open access research for crissake!

pseudoriemann

What! Who comes up with rules like that where everyone loses except for billionaires abroad? Now I'm almost (but not quite) glad my plans to study in the UK didn't pan out haha. I hope the push back succeeds and reason wins in the end.

nargran

I think probably Microsoft itself has a hand on those rules. Paired with the fact that those in charge are usually technically illiterate or close, so are easy targets for corporate buzzwords and false promises of "security".