The advance of the COVID-19 pandemic scenario has forced measures such as the implementation of teleworking and distance learning. These and other measures are considered fundamental in this challenging phase, to prevent the spread of the virus. The vast majority of the team at the Foundation for Science and Technology's FCCN Unit is teleworking and access to the infrastructures we manage is restricted.
These days there has been a growth in the use of our collaborative platforms, as teachers, students and employees of higher education and research entities, in order to continue their work, are using them and adopting collaborative work environments, trying to ensure the maintenance of teaching and research activities.
We are pleased to see real experiences of successful use of the platforms we provide. In true acceptance of the premise "necessity sharpens ingenuity" and thanking the "quality and responsiveness of the Colibri service", ISPA professor João Marôco, Ph.D., shared with the FCCN team the creative setup he found to be able to give an experimental lesson on Statistical Analysis 1. The recipe was simple: "a laptop, a smartphone and a Colibri account", he said.
"I log into the Colibri account through the laptop(host) and simultaneously on the smartphone(co-host), which is filming a blank sheet of paper. When I need to solve an exercise on the sheet, I pass the screen to the smartphone and "spotlight video". The students see the resolution (with a 0.5 s lag) that I do on the sheet", explains the teacher. The result is satisfactory and fulfills the purpose:
*Pictures kindly provided by Professor João Marôco.
At the end of the lesson, the students reported that they were able to follow the subject. The lesson could be recorded to be made available later. One of the participating students, Diogo, also mentioned: "Visually, I must say that I was quite surprised. (...) It was very good to have several perspectives: visualising the calculator - which was what I was most afraid of - and having the camera pointed at the written parts. I was very surprised by the sound quality and the quality of the call. In terms of student-teacher participation, it works well. The only thing better than this is being in class with the teacher but, as far as possible, this is the best condition we can have", he added.
We take this opportunity to publicize our social media channels, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN and we count on our community to share their experiences with the work tools and support services we provide so that the activities can continue in this difficult period that we will overcome together. We urge you to use the hashtag #FiqueEmCasaFCCN whenever you wish to share good use cases of our platforms and services, so that they can eventually be adapted by other teachers.
Our teams are committed to providing full support and to equipping the teaching and research community with the platforms and connectivity needed to work at a distance.
