Assalamo aleikum, we’ll be pausing the Tafsir classes for the next five weeks since Sheikh Azhar will be busy during Ramadan offering classes in Arabic Grammar.
iA classes will resume after Eid
In the meantime there are many recorded tafsirs available at www.why-quran.org/all-tafsirs. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend starting with the tafsir of Surah Najm
Jazakallah
Verses 16-21 of Surah Ar-Rum discuss various signs of Allah and our remembrance of him. They describe the times in which He should be remembered, and Sheikh Azhar Nasser shares a hadith about why we have five wajib prayers.
Live classes + Q&A are held on Wednesdays at 7pm PST. Subscribe below to get reminders of upcoming classes and to hear about new tafsirs.
You can watch past lectures in the series here
Assalamo aleikum,
Here are some instructions for how Islamic Centers can effectively hold online programs for their community members.
The coronavirus has forced many of our centers to cancel their programs, just when their communities need them the most. iA these steps may help those centers provide some of their services. These recommendations are based on lessons learned while organizing online tafsir classes at why-quran.org over the past four years.
You’ll find five different stages below, starting with the easiest one to implement, which will let you quickly start offering programs.
They’re all designed to let you conduct programs while everyone remains in their own homes, including the scholar and the tech team (if any).
Each stage builds upon the previous one, gradually becoming more complex but also offering you something better in return (e.g. ease of use for your community, interactive lectures, higher quality recordings). You can stop at whichever option you’re most comfortable with.
This is the easiest way to get started
What this gets you:
What you’ll need:
Give the speaker the username and password for your center’s YouTube account (if you don’t have one yet, they’re free to create). When it’s time to start the lecture, the speaker will need to go to youtube.com, log in with the YouTube account, and click on the camcorder icon on the top right corner of the window, and then click on “Go Live”
On the page that it takes you to, click on the WEBCAM option:
You may see a message about allowing YouTube access to your camera and microphone. Let it have that access.
Now you can setup the lecture and give it a title. Set your privacy level to Public.
You’ll also want to select the button that says “No, it’s not made for kids.” Please understand, this doesn’t prevent kids from watching it. Saying ‘yes’ means you’re making a program specifically intended *only* for kids, and it forces you to comply with other legal requirements. Most masjid programs don’t fall under that category.
When you click next you’ll see a preview of your lecture. Click “Go Live” to start broadcasting the lecture publicly
How can other people find the lecture? You have two options
Option 1: If you click on the arrow at the bottom of the page then you’ll see a url that will take people to the correct YouTube page. You can share that link with others
The downside here is that you have to wait until the livestream starts before you can share the link with anyone.
Option 2: Share your YouTube channel url with people. The livestream will become visible there once it starts.
You can get your YouTube channel url by clicking on your account logo on the top-right corner of YouTube.com, right clicking “Your Channel”, and clicking “Copy link address”
When you’re done giving the lecture, click the “End Stream” button at the bottom of the page
Why would you want this?
This is exactly the same as Stage 1, except you’ll do the steps before the lecture time and and clicking “Schedule for later.” That’ll let you set a time in the future when you want your lecture to actually start and will give you a link where the livestream will be viewable. You can share that link with your community, making it much easier for them to find the lecture.
When it’s time to start the lecture click “Go Live” and the Live Stream will begin and be automatically recorded. When you’re done with the lecture click the “End Stream” button at the bottom of the page.
What this gets you:
Downsides:
This step is pretty simple. Register for a Zoom.us account and buy their Pro plan (or the Business plan if you expect more than 100 participants).
Follow the instructions to create your meeting, and then share the meeting link with your community before the class starts.
This time, the scholar doesn’t have to do anything themselves. Someone else can create the zoom meeting and send them an invitation to join the meeting.
What this gets you:
Downsides:
In this setup, we first follow the steps in Stage 2 to schedule a live stream via YouTube, then we use Zoom to setup a webinar, connect the Zoom webinar to the YouTube livestream, and stream the Zoom webinar over YouTube.
On your Zoom.us plan, add the the webinar add on
Create a recurring meeting on Zoom. You can select anything for the date and time, Zoom won’t make you stick to those times (I make this a recurring meeting). Then click ‘Save Meeting’
Follow the steps on this page to enable Live Streaming the meeting to YouTube. Specifically, you want to enable streaming to a Custom Live Streaming Service (which would be YouTube in our case). So you’ll want to follow the steps under “Streaming a Meeting or Webinar to a YouTube Event” to be able to stream to scheduled events. Note that while it is possible to stream to YouTube without setting up the Custom Live Streaming Service, you’ll not be able to schedule a class in advance (so you’ll loose out on the benefits of Stage 2).
After reading the instructions linked to above, if you’re confused about where to enter the stream url and key (that part of the instructions isn’t very clear), go to your meeting’s page on Zoom and scroll down to the bottom of to see the Live Streaming options
Click “configure live stream settings”. That’s where the information should go
To share the link to this lecture with others, you’ll want to share the YouTube stream URL (the same one you shared in Step 2). The Zoom webinar is limited to 100 people, so you can’t have too many people join that at once. They would also have to install Zoom to make it work, making it harder for them
When it’s time to start the lecture, the Zoom host and speaker should both join the Zoom meeting and the host should specify “More->Live on Custom Live Streaming Service”.
Then go to the YouTube studio page for the stream and click “Go Live” to actually start streaming.
Additional options to improve the broadcast:
What this gets you:
Downsides:
The recordings created by the previous stages are good, but live streamed video tends to be lower quality than normal recordings. And if at any point the internet connection weakens then the video or even the audio can cut out for a few seconds. That’s bad enough during a live stream, it feels even more jarring when someone is watching a recording!
This step will show you how to simultaneously stream the Live Stream while also recording it to your computer at a higher resolution. That way you’ll have a video with a much better quality recording that you can upload later on.
We keep the exact same setup that we had in Stage 4, but add some extra software to also record the lecture locally.
To do this we’ll need to use a free program called Open Broadcaster Software (OBS). You can download it from https://obsproject.com. We will only use it to record the lecture in HD. We’ll continue to use Stage 4’s Zoom + YouTube setup for the actual live stream.
You’ll want to install OBS on the main speaker’s laptop. If you can’t visit them in person, you can use Zoom to have a video chat with them and ask them to share their desktop. Request to control their desktop remotely and install & configure OBS.
You can find multiple videos on YouTube for how to setup OBS for recording (you could try skimming this one for the important parts). You’ll want to set your video output to be at a 1080p resolution and video format to .mkv.
Also, note the Recording Path setting. We won’t set this right now, but you’ll come back to this setting a few steps later so remember where you saw it.
Once you have OBS setup to record the video, right after connecting to the Zoom lecture the lecturer will need to click the “Start Recording” button on OBS to start recording locally, and then click “Stop Recording” once the lecture is complete.
Now your speaker will need to either upload the lecture to YouTube, or put it on a service somewhere that the people doing the video editing can access it. Following the principle of “make it as simple as possible for the speaker”, ideally the the speaker should have to do nothing.
Instead, you can install a cloud storage program like OneDrive or Dropbox to their laptop, create a shared folder that both the speaker and tech team have access to, and set that folder as OBS’s Recording Path (remember that setting I asked you to note?). This way any new lecture will automatically be come available to the rest of the team. (Be sure the account which owns these shared folders has sufficient storage space on it).
Want even better quality recordings? Upgrade your speaker to a higher quality, 1080p webcam. It’ll make a big difference at this stage.
Mac users can skip this section. There’s one extra problem with Windows laptops: by default their webcam can only be used by just one program. So it’s either OBS or Zoom. But we want to use both, that’s how we get both local recording and live streaming.
To make this work download and install a free software called ManyCam, available at manycam.com. This will give your computer a virtual webcam that can be shared by multiple programs. Set this as the video source for both OBS and Zoom
The general idea is to take a professional quality camcorder and turn it into a webcam for your laptop, which will require using a hdmi video capture card.
This is something we’re experimenting with right now. I’ll update these instructions once I get this setup to work successfully.
Stay tuned
These are multiple options that you can utilize based on your level of technical knowledge. You can start off easily by adopting Stage 1, and gradually go on to the next stage as you feel it’s needed.
If you get stuck or have suggestions to improve these methods, please reach out! You can share questions/comments below or send me an email at tech-support@why-quran.org and I’ll do my best to help out.
Iltemase dua
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