For reasons that don’t require explanation at this point, I’m doing a lot of real-time teaching online these days.
I often show short video clips to my students using Youtube. I notice that occasionally while using Blackboard Collab Ultra, while sharing the Youtube video tab, my browser slows or freezes. Sometimes I end up having to close the browser and reopen it.
It’s time for a new computer anyway, so if I want to continue teaching media-heavy courses I’ll need to have a computer that can handle this more reliably. What specs should I look for here? Is this a RAM issue? Something else? I’d appreciate any advice.
Short answer - Its your internet speed. Increase the size of your line.
Long answer - Your internet comes with two measurements - the speed in which it pulls things down from the internet, which is called your Download speed, and the speed in which it puts things up to the internet, which is called your Upload speed. Prior to 2020, most people’s home internet was geared towards downloading stuff, so internet providers would give you a line that was 100/10, which meant you pulled down data at 100 megs per second, and uploaded at 10 megs per second. This was because people were watching netflix, or youtube, which didn’t upload anything, just pulled it down.
Now, with more people broadcasting stuff, the upload rate has become an issue. You can receive their video with no issue, but when you try to broadcast stuff, your slow upload rate will jam up your internet, and make things freeze.
Look into what your current specs provided to you by your internet provider. See what the rate is, and see how much it will cost you to get a better upload speed.
Basically, if you get a smokin’ fast new laptop, it won’t matter at all, because you just can’t pump the data out to the people fast enough. A slow computer, with a blazing fast upload speed, will do a lot better.
Totally agree with this, but – maybe obviously – your broadband service could be fast and your older PC could still be the choke point, particularly if it’s old enough not to get the most out of your wireless connection.
To Dark_Sponge’s point … if your computer is older … maybe do your speedtest with a recent vintage laptop or smartphone (Android/iPhone).
In the alternative, if you can hard wire your PC to your modem via an Ethernet cable, a speed test might be more informative (ie, you could compare wireless to wired).
It could be a clogged up computer rather than a slow internet connection. After a while computers get polluted by software that slows them down. The answer is to reinstall the operating system from scratch and only install the software you need. Also new computers come bloated with ‘crapware’. Stores are paid to out trial versions of programs on systems they sell that sit there in the background, slowing your computer down and sending you warnings that hackers are about to invade unless you buy their program. I’ve notices some anti-virus programs go haywire downloading updates. An over-populated /temp folder will slow your computer down to a crawl.
A upload speed for livestreaming needs about 6Mbits or so. For RAM, 4 or 8Mb is OK. Replacing the spinning rust Hard Drive with an Solid State Drive improves performance dramatically.
I regularly use fairly old computers Enterprise grade that I buy second hand and I upgrade them with a new operating system, max out the memory and install an SSD. A lot of consumer grade laptops cannot be easily upgraded, they solder the memory chips down. The processor is not so important. Most are quite powerfuil enough for most tasks. It is always a good idea to have more that one computer at hand.
If you are buying new a reasonable spec is 16Gb RAM and 512Gb SSD. Lenovos are quite good.
I use this program to remove unwanted software, but there are others that do the same thing.
Folks, while I appreciate the importance of internet speed, I’m getting different outcomes on different devices - for example, my wife’s computer doesn’t give me any trouble pumping YouTube through a shared chrome tab, while mine does. (Just using my wife’s computer forever isn’t really an option.)
They’re both using the same connection, I’m using Chrome on both of them, etc.
I’ll certainly check into the “crapware” issue on my current machine, but I’d appreciate any other advice too.
Ace309, I’m feeling similar frustration at the wide disparities between different devices (on the same Internet connection). On Tuesday and Wednesday I booted my laptop from an OpenBSD hard drive, to test out a recent libsndio patch that allows different devices to be used for audio capture versus audio playback. With no native Zoom client I was forced to use the browser-based version of Zoom. This experience did not go well. The audio signal was extremely choppy after going through all the necessary conversions (microphone transducer → USB data stream → OpenBSD’s uaudio driver → sndio resampling → WebRTC backend). The video feed from a webcam advertised as “Full HD” was still coming across at the camera sensor resolution (640x480) rather than the 15-megapixel interpolation that would have been possible using better drivers.
A native Zoom client might have solved some of these issues. After putting on hold the OpenBSD experiment and booting from a hard drive with ArchLinux and a native Zoom client, I found that students were once again able to hear my voice and see my webcam image. Even Collaborate Ultra seemed snappier during this morning’s class, compared to the sluggish experience on Tuesday.
In summary, your choice of software does make quite a difference in how smooth your synchronous online classes will be. If you use an OS where driver development is slow to implement new features, or where the videoconferencing software has to run inside a web browser, then your experience will be severely degraded compared to running a more mainstream OS with native clients for the videoconferencing service.