Hold up a sign.
Big, bold, unmistakeable letters that read "Your Mic Is Off". If he still doesn't get the point then fire him & replace him with something smarter... like a plastic potted plant. =-Jp
Yes, we're still in the thick of a pandemic. No, we haven't seen anyone outside our immediate family for months. Yes, we're working from home. Bit boring, isn't it? That means videoconferencing remains the meeting-and-socialising method du jour, and plenty of opportunities for the less computer-savvy to screw it up so we can …
anyone recall Fawlty Towers, SitCom with John Cleese ?
at the start, every week, the sign had Fawlty Towers shown
then they started to mix it up, each week something different
told my mum to watch out for it
THAT week, THAT week
Flowery Twats ........................ ffs
Maybe he's working under the same rules as UK teachers doing remote teaching from many state schools where "because child protection" the teachers are not allowed to see any pictures of their pupils who are (allegedly - who'd know if they wern't there if there's no picture) in the "class".
It sounds like a UI issue... we're all used to the convention of a flashing red dot on a camera to denote video is being recorded, or a red light outside a radio studio to denote that a live broadcast is in progress.
A similarly clear, unmissable visual element should be used by the teleconferencing software to denote that video - and audio - is being sent. Perhaps the audio indicator could take the form of a graphical 'recording level' indicator.
it's like a coffee filter except for cats.
My first thought was exactly the opposite. Surely a kitten filter keeps kittens out of your computer. I think most computers must come with one. And they seem to work much better than most tech as I can't recall the last time I saw a computer infested with cats.
Had a live and in person lecture at my Aussie uni once many moons ago (again maths), the lecturer was a Pakistani lecturer who, to be honest, we had always had some trouble understanding, so when he started into the lesson and we couldnt understand what he was talking about no one thought to much about it. After about 10 minutes, a student towards the front of the class managed to get the lecturers attention and said "Ahhh sir, I can understand you fine, but I dont think too many other people here speak Farsi. Perhaps English would be better?"
We all had a good laugh and the lecturer saw the funny side of it, so all good.
So lecturers and students not being able to understand each other goes back long before Covid. And it was still just as funny back then...
When you thought you were muted but you're not.
I've had to train the missus not to immediately start talking to me if she walks into the home office and I have my headset on; now she waits until I indicate it's all good. (No cameras in defense so she comes and goes as she pleases; so do the kids getting paper for schoolwork.)
Side story: I had a bit of trouble a couple weeks ago. When trying to unmute the headset (USB) another chat/softphone program thought I wanted to make a call and I got a nice loud dial tone that covered everyone else and I couldn't talk through. Tried to go into the headset software to disable the offending program (and the dial tone completely), but it wouldn't uncheck. Kept having to close said program every time I had a meeting with either of our audio/screen meeting services (one for internal, another for customer). Resolved itself for reasons unknown.
Now they say the internal meeting software is becoming our primary softphone, replacing the IP phone back on the office desk. Hopefully things still work nicely when that change happens.
My daughter works for a company that has some fairly extreme but justified security so I made a sign she could put on her door that advised she was in a Zoom meeting so we wouldn't accidently interrupt one of these top secret meetings. It works well and no need to train any potential interlopers.
I was on a very boring compulsory training course via Zoom a couple of weeks ago when the trainer muted himself by accident. Nobody mentioned it then, and nobody has mentioned it since.
Lockdown has some advantages, being able to sleep through HR-mandated bollocks being one of them.
I think BBC said on air that the judge in the case made the decision to release this recording. It might be in their clip.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56010156
"Tweeting about the incident, Judge Roy Ferguson, who presided over the session, said it showed 'the legal community's effort to continue representing their clients in these challenging times'."
That's not how education post-school works.
In college/university, you're expected to learn of your own accord, and lectures are there for you to be lectured at... not in a negative way, it's literally just watch, follow on, absorb the complicated material in the overview that you're given in a lecture, then study after that to understand what the hell he was going on about and why he skipped over certain parts.
Only the UK and the US cling to the "teacher-led spoonfeeding" kind of education you describe past any significant age. Everyone else presents the material, explains it from a distance, and then it's up to you to study and understand it.
It's why many people never make it past that point, because they lack the ability or self-discipline to learn on their own.
I know a few Italian professors, some of whom now teach in prestigious London universities, who decry quite how spoonfed everything is in the UK compared to how they teach in Italy. They refer to it as "the American system", almost spitting the words, and see it as a dumbed-down education. They also still do things like put pupils back a year if they're not performing to standard. We stopped doing that decades ago.
This is true for some institutions, programs, and courses, but not for all. As usual, a generalization proves to be wrong as often as it is right.
In my three decades of post-secondary education, none - not a single one - of the courses I attended or taught were recitations. They were all interactive. I don't think I ever sat through (and certainly never gave) a lecture that lasted more than half an hour, and even that was unusual.
As for "the American system", it sounds like your Italian professors don't know much about how higher education works in the US. Or perhaps they're thinking of other countries in the Americas?
At least in some US universities (if not most), in large lectures, with up to hundreds of students, the professor lectures, but for the same course in a different timeslot there are multiple smaller "classes" or "tutorials" usually led by by graduate students with up to (say) 20 students, the point of which is to encourage interactive discussion, and sometimes includes real time lab work or working out or analyzing problems in real time as a group. Those smaller sessions are intended to be the OPPOSITE of being spoon fed - I think - but then the definition of "spoon fed" is rather subjective.
I guess it depends heavily on the subject: Some lend themselves to lab work, others not so much. I can't imagine math, for instance, being taught otherwise than by somebody filling a blackboard and explaining what (s)he's doing.
Medicine on the other hand is necessarily as much hand-on as possible, you really want students to know the reality of what they are reading about, and not discovering it on their first patients...