Starting in the Fall of 2020, I used the live lightboard approach for remote instruction during the Covid-19 Pandemic. If you aren’t familiar, a lightboard is like a whiteboard in a class room, but you write on a transparent panel of glass/plastic and the camera captures your face and the writing! I followed the general approach by Prof. Claypool, also at WPI (https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/misc/lightboard/), but had to make some adjustments so it could fit in my tiny apartment. It took some adjustments, finding correct hardware, settings, and carefully controlling all of the light. You can see below how I improved my lightboard set-up while I was using it.
The set-up I used wasn’t perfect, but the entire set-up cost $200 while commercial units typically cost around $5,000. A feature of this set up that really helped is that I had a screen behind the glass so I could see the class in the zoom gallery – I could gauge the class’s understanding by observing nodding and/or confused faces on student’s faces. Now I’m very happy to be back in the classroom, but if I was ever teaching a course entirely online, I would use a lightboard again – probably the new Lightboard Suite at WPI!