Tablet Blackboard Instructionals

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Why

Khan Academy - one of if not THE most successful instructionals program in the world - uses digital blackboard instructionals. Picking up on this proven model, OSE likes blackboard instructionals as well as a rapid way to create instructionals.

There are several features of designing these that make them very useful over diagram only, text only, video only, or sound only, or kinesthetic only learning formats:

  1. They are multimedia - videos with voice + dynamic drawing or writing. They are information dense for visual picture, (visual) text, auditory, and in some manner kinesthetic (due to dynamic drawing/writing)
  2. They are improved over plain diagrams - as a diagram itself does not contain much narrative, and one does not see how a diagram evolves from beginning to end.
  3. Black (colar of background) is the absence of distraction - allowing one to focus on what's drawn up
  4. If the still for the video captures the last screen - the still functions as a useful diagram in itself. Except that this diagram is really a multimedia video.
  5. It is much quicker to draw up a diagram via a drawing tablet than by diagramming software. Thus, if an effective, open source toolchain exists for creating these videos - this can provide a scalable, distributed teaching infrastructure.
  6. If we can teach the blackboard instructionals protocol to OSE contributors, we could increase our development velocity.
  7. Videos can be interactive - by adding clickable links to the video.

Disadvantages:

  1. Requires a tablet
  2. Requires basic proficiency in the workflow to make this effective as opposed to time-consuming and therefore unsustainable

Notes

To make the process effective, setup of a Blackboard Instructional needs to be embedded into OSE Linux, and startup needs to be made automatic so that all Developers can active the system on demand - with a click of a button. This should be done with a Script that activates all the software as needed. This may involve compiling modified versions of the required software.

Links