Using OGS to teach Go online

Good day!

As Go club activities in my country as been suspended due to Quarantine, I was thinking about teaching people from my work Go, to give them something new to keep their mind of the annoying virus. OGS seemed the most indicate to do so, but I have little experience using reviews, groups and such.

So I write to see if anyone has already done similar things. The main issue is that it wouldnt be 1o1 teaching game, but to around 5-10 people at a time. Maybe creating a group? Is there a voice chat for so many people?

Any advice or feedback would be appreciated
Please and thank you

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Iā€™ve taught Go lessons (individual and group) on OGS for a few years now. On OGS, you can make games and demonstration boards public or private. If you make the boards private, youā€™ll need to add your students to the access list from the sidebar of each board. You can communicate with your students through an OGS group. When you post group news, the system automatically notifies all group members. OGS used to have voice chat, but not anymore. The service was highly unstable. So now you need to use an external service like discord or Skype if you donā€™t fancy text-based lessons.

P.S.: If you ever give a public lesson at no charge, admins can advertise it with a sitewide banner. I usually pull about 50 viewers whenever I do that.

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I see, thanks for the reply! Seems really easy and doable. Iā€™ll create a Discord server and a Go group then. I was thinking in free classes but keep it to my coworkers for the time being. When reviewing a game, is there a way they can mark or fork variations unseen to other players but me?
For the usual questions like "What if I had played ā€œthatthisthenā€ without giving them control of the review?
It would cool to know or have, even when reviewing with friends

4 Likes

No, but that potential new feature may interest our developer @anoek. Currently, if a user posts a variation, anyone can view it. But they have to click on it or hover their cursor over it before they will see the variation. If you donā€™t want that, then you could ask your students to send you the move sequences by private message.

Uhmm, I think I could make use of that to show everyone the variatons the other students thought.
Thanks, you have been very kind and nice

1 Like