Hello

In order to offer online teaching courses (video/audio) with a student (each class would last an hour), would a Web camera/microphone with the following specifications be sufficient, please? (Please see attached). I have a Win 10 desktop PC.

Thanks!Biggest concern would be your internet CONNECTION speed ( aka bandwidth ). You will want to have a healthy bandwidth for upload speed more so than the download speed as you would be hosting audio/video content which the video stream uses the most bandwidth.

The webcam itself looks ok. Depending on the camera itself you can have higher or lower definition. A good test would be to make a video with it and see if your happy with the quality of it. If the quality is fine then that is the quality that you should achieve with a healthy internet connection to support the streaming that you want to provide.

Other concern would be students as to what they have for internet connection as for their video quality of the stream also is dependent on healthy internet connection with plenty of bandwidth and equal to or better cameras than yours for you to see them in return during the stream.

Note: If your internet connection is lacking bandwidth, the software that you connect with others will usually handshake with a video stream that is poorer quality as a means to sustain maximum frames per second and not have lag with freeze frames with higher definition stream. It would be good to test your internet connection for this by maybe connecting to a friend using the same streaming software that will be used to verify that its all working well before you start with the first day of class.

Other suggestion also would be to be sure that if your connected via wifi to the internet that you have a strong healthy connection with the internet as for if you have a WEAK signal, your wifi will handshake at a slower speed to maintain the communication and this would make streaming software handshake at lesser picture quality like 360p etc which is blurry on large screens. A wired Cat5 or Cat6 internet connection would be best vs wifi, however if a good internet connection with strong signal strength can be maintained then you would guarantee maximum bandwidth with the internet through your wifi.That's brilliant, Dave, thank you. Great idea to test the bandwidth and video resolution beforehand - I hadn't thought of something so obvious. Happy you think the camera/microphone device itself seems OK.
Many thanks againNo Problem Helping ... That's what we are here for...

I was thinking today that if you ever have any students who don't have the bandwidth to maintain a good video stream, one option may be to record yourself teaching whatever the course is and offer that as a download to those students.

Only issues with this METHOD of teaching is that its not live environment and so they would have to follow along with the video and then ask questions to you via e-mail or something like that, as well as the downloaded classes could be shared with others who didn't pay you to attend whatever is being taught and so there is potential for people getting the training material and learning for free which might not be wanted if its a paid for course. Other than that for cons to prerecorded course content, a pro to it is that you might be able to expand into taking on students who otherwise couldn't stream, but their internet connection is just enough bandwidth to download and view after hours of downloading over a minimal bandwidth (aka slow internet connection ).

So I figured I'd share that if you ever find that you have students who are not privileged with fast large bandwidth internet connections, it may be a means of having them as students. I myself have taught voluntarily middle school and high school students for after school Robotics competition programs and towards the end of my instructing of students experience, I ended up running into a scheduling conflict between my career schedule and after school Robotics program and so instead of leaving the group and being a let down to them when they didnt want to see me leave, I was providing videos that I recorded for the students to watch and LEARN from and the other adult volunteers were then able to still have me there even though I wasn't able to physically be there at 3:30pm to assist live with it. The students and volunteer adults who helped the students would SEND me questions and I'd send back answers etc.