Piloting "Shindig" as a Zoom alternative for mixed-mode environments
Role Summary
Project manager tasked with evaluating the efficacy of “Shindig” as a web-conferencing tool in a mixed-mode (or hyflex) learning environment. Worked with a project team comprised of faculty, student employees, and staff.
Particular emphasis on using the tool to help facilitate a “design studio” environment wherein both in-person and remote students could freely divide into working groups as desired, while preserving a unified space for the instructor to either work with the whole class or else sidebar with select students.
Development Summary
- Client: Learning, Design, & Technology Program at Georgetown University
- Deliverable: Technology Pilot and corresponding Report
- Tools Used: Shindig, Google Apps, Canvas
- Time in Development: Five Months
Background
One of the classes in the “Learning, Design, and Technology” program is the “Design Studio”, a space for students to work freely on their projects from other classes while learning design methods, and giving feedback to each other. In the mixed-mode environment combining both in-person and remote learners, collaboration between the two groups can become very difficult. Within zoom, breakout groups are possible but require a lot of oversight – negating one of the main goals of freeform collaboration for this class.
Additionally, when students in the same classroom join the same Zoom session, a common challenge was the resulting shrieking and hissing noises that result from the computers echoing and hearing the audio from each other..
While students did freely communicate in other shared online spaces (slack, google apps, the chat in Zoom) we wanted to experiment with other web-conferencing tools to see if we couldn’t encourage a student-driven experience for collaboration across mediums.
Process
Preparing for the Pilot
Shindig had previously been part of the ongoing conversation at Georgetown as an alternative for Zoom in some of our online classes. As such, we were familiar with some of the unique features that could facilitate a more flexible environment for students participating in a Shindig session. The most important of which was the ability for students to freely sidebar with other students in the session, an important consideration for students in the classroom to avoid any shrieking and high-pitched feedback loops.
Once we identified Shindig as a possible solution for our design challenge, I set about preparing to pilot this software in our design studio classroom for a semester, starting with the following steps.
- Desk research
- Faculty recruitment
- Evaluation Plan
- Documentation
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Using Shindig in the HyFlex Classroom
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Outcomes & Lessons Learned
While shindig helped facilitate a free-flowing “HyFlex” classroom overall, there were some overall
Shindig differs from Zoom in that it creates a more flexible atmosphere for remote participants by giving them several options to communicate without disturbing the facilitator, and without accidentally causing distracting loud noises emerging from multiple microphones being used. However, the lack of informational resources, the browser-based security restrictions, and challenges related to connectivity/bandwidth made it difficult to use and negatively affected student experiences, particularly for in-person participants.
