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Coronavirus and online education


In connection with the spread of coronavirus, many educational institutions in Russia and in the world went online. It so happened that over the past few years I have been organizing online education and understand what are the most affordable and convenient services for translating the educational process online. Since my activity is mainly associated with the teaching of mathematical disciplines, this is what I will tell.



Material Creation


In work on materials, we, like almost everyone who is seriously involved in mathematics, prefer to use LaTeX. Its capabilities make it possible to compose beautiful mathematical texts and are the standard in the global scientific community. Usually, several people work on creating materials - therefore, joint work on files is necessary. The most convenient and affordable service is definitely Overleaf . You can use it right away, you just need to register. Using this service, you will free yourself from the headache with a local installation of the basic configuration, editor, additional libraries and other things.



It turns out a beautiful math text, which can be downloaded in pdf.

Lectures and workshops


An important part of classical mathematical education are lectures and seminars. We spend them at Zoom. This service is very flexible and easy to configure. You can make a conference in a lecture format (just a broadcast from the lecturer to all participants, they can ask questions in text). Or you can start a seminar (a conference in which a seminarian talks about problems, and people can ask something if they want by turning on their microphone for a while).

Cool, if the teachers have a board at hand and you can clearly show everything. However, this is not always the case. Then such a simple thing as a graphics tablet can come to the rescue.

Surprisingly, a graphics tablet is an extremely cheap and very convenient way to write mathematical formulas and calculations on a computer. You write formulas as if in your notebook. Supported options can be found on marketplaces in the range of 1000-2000 rubles. We like Wacom brand tablets. For example - Wacom CTL-671, which perfectly suits our tasks. We do not need any tricks in the tablets, because we are not illustrators, we just need to write mathematical text and erase. Among the programs in which you can do this, it is worth highlighting Photoshop or Smoothdraw (this service, by the way, uses the legendary Khan Academy).

Our favorite is Wacom CTL-671:



Here are the seminars:



Communication


An important fact that is worth noting: in the modern world, we learn not only from teachers, but also from colleagues (classmates, classmates). Therefore, it is important to build a convenient and effective communication with friends. When it comes to education, you need to choose the right messenger. There are several options.

Many people choose Telegram. But I do not like him, as a means of serious work. All discussions are mixed in one message stream. To find something, you have to use a message search, which of course does not always help.

Corporate messengers are great for online education, the most famous of them is Slack. We prefer to use it. It allows you to create channels, each of which has its own purpose. For example, in our channel #general organizational announcements are made, in the channel # org-matters you can ask a question about the organization and get an answer, and in channels # week-1, # week-2 and the like, different blocks of topics are discussed. You can create a separate channel for each student for homework, this is convenient. Discussions are in threads. So if one person asked something, then the discussion of his question goes into one thread and does not clog the general flow. Very comfortable! You can also add bots there that will make life even better. For example, a bot for instant layout Latex. So that you can ask questions more clearly.A free quota of 10 thousand messages in one workshop in Slack is enough to organize one short course.



Conclusion


At first, you can easily get lost in a huge selection of tools for organizing online learning. I hope my article helped someone make their choice. In such difficult times for classical education - I am sure that you can organize a high-quality educational process online and these are the best services for its creation.

Azat Kalmykov, curator at ShAD Helper

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