Online education has never been this significant as it is today. The ability to teach virtually and pursue education online gives more flexibility to both teachers and students. The recent pandemic COVID 19 has made live streaming significant and a necessity to reach people across the world. Students are involved in online distant learning to connect with their teachers and accessing education online. Even in the absence of a critical crisis, online education is becoming a norm and is opening doors to the future of modern education. 

Be it an urgent situation like an ongoing pandemic or regular opportunities to reach a global learner community, live streaming needs to be a part of your communication strategy as a fundamental element to distance eLearning. 

Advantages of Live Streaming for Online Teaching

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Live streaming for educators will allow students to watch the expert educators in their field as they solve problems in real-time. Live videos will definitely change the future of learning. Let’s look into the advantages live streaming offers to both educators and students alike. 

Broaden Online Reach

Online educators allow to reach a wide global audience through live streaming. While video conference works for small sized online classes, live broadcasts help educators to expand their online reach and connect with thousands of students across the globe. Educators can effortlessly take online classes by broadcasting live on social live streaming solutions like Facebook Live or YouTube Live to get more exposure when broadcasting live. 

Easy Access to Knowledge

Getting access to online education has never been easier. Everyone who has access to a strong broadband connection can easily get access to online courses. When you integrate live streaming to your regular online classes, learners can grow their knowledge and expand the learning experience much further. Live broadcasting helps to increase the level of interaction between educators and learners.  

High Level of Interaction

Compared to normal video courses, live broadcasting facilitates a high level of engagement that boosts online education experience. The real-time engagement opportunities offered by live classroom streaming platforms allow students to take part in online interactions, ask questions, interact with each other, and express their feedback. While most students are hesitant when it comes to asking questions in a classroom, an online space gives them a more confident platform to feel much easier and express their opinions. 

Cost-Effectiveness

Unlike traditional education, online education in general, is a cheaper alternative for educators, teachers, and institutions which is an advantage in itself. But, live streaming takes it further. While the most common way to live stream your online classes is to use free platforms like Periscope, Facebook Live, YouTube Live, etc. Alternatively, you can think about how to create a live streaming classroom if you want to take it a step further. Even if you want to build your own live streaming platform, the cost to create professional live streaming is of less cost again.

Show and Demonstrate

Live streaming calls for highly visual online learning experiences that are beneficial to both teachers and students. The attention span of students is short and live streaming is a great way to capture the instant attention of your students and keep them engaged. 

When online education meets technology, especially live streaming, the opportunities are limitless. With the capability to live broadcast, share the screen in real-time, use recorded videos, add multiple cameras, teachers have limitless opportunities to impact students with an online video education platform. 

Analytical Features

One major advantage of live streaming in the field of online education is the analytics offered by live streaming solutions to gauge the performance of your online classes. Teachers can analyze the performance of their live classes to find out what is working and what needs to be optimized. For example, if you have thousands of participants in your live class initially, but half of them dropped out later, you can use the analytical tools to evaluate what causes this. Tracking performance and optimizing and your online courses will improve the performance and expand your online reach.

Collaboration and Sharing

Another considerable benefit of online classroom live streaming is the collaborative teaching environment and sharing opportunities. As your classes are live, you can also allow other educators to join your live classes from any part of the world. Live classroom streaming platforms offer fantastic opportunities for you to grow your user base and get more learners to subscribe to your online courses. 

Teaching and Learning on the go

Both educators and educators can reap benefits from live broadcasts. Live streaming allows students to access your real-time classes from anywhere across the globe which accelerates the chance of them coming back to your platform for more. As it is easy to get in touch with students via smartphones, you can easily notify your students when you are going live. For educators, the ability to live stream from anywhere creates wonderful opportunities and possibilities to reach their student base. 

Creating an Online Classroom with Live Streaming

To provide an uninterrupted online learning experience to students, live streaming is an important tool to stream your online classroom sessions to your students. The online classroom live streaming also helps educators to deliver an in-person classroom experience and engage students with real-time interactions. 

Let’s all look into how to create a live streaming classroom for educators to broadcast over the internet to connect with their students. 

Plan

Try to plan your live streaming content capture way too in advance. This is because you don’t want to miss out on your potential students when you are actually going live. Incorporate live streaming to your content calendar and announce it earlier so that your students will come to know when you are going live. Again, plan to do a test live streaming run to test the audio and sound quality and find the right spot to place your camera. 

Set Up the Equipment

To get started with live classroom streaming, you need a high-quality camera and a microphone. As your live broadcasts are a replacement for a real classroom learning, ensure the quality of your live broadcasts matches that of a real classroom. If your live streams are of poor quality, students will lose their focus even if the content is great. 

To avoid this situation, invest in high-quality live streaming equipment if your budget allows. Another important piece of equipment you need is a video encoder which is a hardware that creates compressed versions of your live streaming as it is recorded. This is to ensure the delivery of good quality streams without buffering even if a viewer doesn’t have a strong internet connection. 

Here are some of the essential pieces of equipment to invest in.

  • Professional quality video camera
  • Best quality microphone
  • A capture card
  • Proper lighting set up
  • An encoder
  • A tripod

Choose the Right Live Streaming Provider

With the right plan and equipment in place, the next thing you need to choose is a good live streaming provider to broadcast your live sessions. Choosing a reliable live classroom streaming platform with a good content delivery network is an advantage. 

A powerful live streaming solution will offer all the essential technologies to build an ideal environment that is equipped with analytical tools to track the number of viewers and their performance. It’s a bonus for educators that offer a wide range of live streaming benefits and features beyond the basic live streaming capabilities. 

Configure a Fast and Secure Internet Connection

Live broadcasting educational content over live classroom streaming platforms need a strong internet connection with robust speed and security features. Make sure your streaming platform is configured with TLS and internet security protocols to protect your content from unauthorized third-party access. To stream high-quality live videos for teachers and students without any glitches, a reliable internet connection with a speed of minimum 2Mbps is required for the smooth streaming of your online educational content.

Prepare your Educational Content

As live classroom broadcasting happens in real-time you need to prepare for the upcoming sessions beforehand. You must have a clear understanding of the lessons you are going to deliver and make sure the content resonates with what your students need. Prepare your lessons and use interactive tools if required if you want to engage your learners. Make it a practice to use whiteboards, recorder screens, or smartboards without distorting the user’s views. Prepare most out of your resources for a clear and intuitive live streaming experience.

Create an Outline of Live Streaming Courses

Live streaming on an online video education platform requires the preparation of courses. Research, plan, and build complete curses details that last a certain duration say for a few weeks or a couple of months. 

Regardless of the subject, you want to stream, creating convenient access to reliable resources is the objective of your online live streaming courses. Live streaming educational content fosters a better relationship with your students to increase the engagement rate. 

Maintaining Consistency is Important

When you are delivering your online classes through live streaming, consistency is an important factor that online education streaming demands. Make sure you live stream your classes to your audience on the promised date and time. Delivering consistent live streaming sessions will prove more effective in creating a positive engagement between you and students facilitating a better learning experience. Determine to create better engagement and incomparable online education resources to deliver to your students. 

With Everything in Place, Start Live Streaming

Once everything is set up including your online video education platform, it’s time to actually go live. Every educator will have their own teaching style but make sure you follow some of the basic live streaming tips. 

  • Speak clearly and loudly to make sure your students follow you.
  • Allow students to share their feedback when participating in discussions.
  • Make sure all your equipment is functional and working fine. 
  • Check your internet connectivity and its speed. 

Set your equipment sometime before the actual broadcast to check the quality of the set up for better live streaming. Once you have passed all the checklists, make sure to relax to prepare yourself for the upcoming live session. The final goal is to educate your students and deliver your online courses to them.

Conclusion

Live streaming in online education has been around for a while and will continue its quest in the future as well. The popularity of social live streaming apps like Facebook, Periscope, YouTube Live, and Meerkat, gives us a glimpse into what the future holds live streaming in online education. Live streaming will continue to transform the online education space with technology and innovation. If you want to take advantage of this highly potential technology, it is recommended to learn how to create a live streaming classroom to deliver a great online learning experience to your students.