Welcome
This project is the product of a months-long collaboration between William S. Beinecke Professor of Accounting Rick Antle and Case Study Research and Development (CRDT) Multimedia Producer Greg MacDonald, both of the Yale School of Management.
It began with Rick’s desire to continue bringing spreadsheets, presentations, documents, and a chalkboard into class, despite the constraints of remote teaching, and his discovery of the open source software OBS Studio. Gamers have long used OBS to produce game sessions — combining and switching between webcams, game windows, data overlays, social media screens, etc. — and to push these sessions to other gamers via streaming platforms like Twitch. When Rick discovered that OBS could also stream to Zoom, which had become Yale’s de facto online teaching platform since the spring, he thought he might have a solution.
The School of Management’s CRDT was his next stop. The team has over ten years of experience producing online pedagogical materials, and, over the summer, they had helped Rick upgrade the presentation of two of his accounting courses on Canvas. This time, he enlisted Greg’s technical expertise to find a reliable and practical approach to using OBS with Zoom, one that would let someone with little to no streaming experience use the technology without becoming overwhelmed by it . As he and Greg charted their way through various workflows, it became clear that what they were learning might be of interest to others, and the idea of creating the “How to Use OBS and Zoom for Online Teaching” project was born.
Neither Rick nor Greg hopes it ends there. The document, this website, and its accompanying Twitter channel, all have the goal of creating community – across Yale and beyond – around the technical challenges of teaching in a socially-distanced world, whether focused on OBS, Zoom, or other technologies.