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• Learning to teach through video

  by Kim Leeder

  October 14, 2009
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  sam­sungtv 009 / http://​www​.flickr​.com/​p​h​o​t​o​s​/​o​u​s​by/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

  It’s a truth so many of us keep in the dark cor­ners of our lives as instruc­tion librar­i­ans: we were never taught to teach. We’re not unusual, really, and the same is true of many of our higher edu­ca­tion col­leagues. We study a field, we gain some exper­tise in that field, and then – bam! – we’re thrown into the class­room with­out even a short les­son on instruc­tional ped­a­gogy. Of course, most instruc­tion librar­i­ans adapt admirably to this cir­cum­stance by doing some research, talk­ing to more expe­ri­enced col­leagues, and gath­er­ing ideas from con­fer­ences. We get up to speed as quickly as pos­si­ble by draw­ing on the knowl­edge around us. In this way, we impro­vise and improve our teach­ing to a level that is, in most cases, sufficient.

  When we try to adapt our instruc­tional strate­gies to a new medium, how­ever, the chal­lenge begins anew. Teach­ing in the class­room is not the same as teach­ing through a course man­age­ment sys­tem (such as Black­board), and teach­ing on Black­board is dif­fer­ent than teach­ing through video. All of these tech­nolo­gies tax our already min­i­mal knowl­edge of instruc­tional the­ory, and the results can turn out to be rather ineffective.

  I’ll be the first to admit that I have made stu­dents watch far too many dull, lengthy screen­cast videos in the effort to help them learn about research. And I’ve seen many sim­i­lar videos around on YouTube and on other library web­sites. Our inten­tions are always good – to edu­cate, to equip stu­dents with research skills – but the tools we pro­duce could be bet­ter. Recently my col­leagues and I have begun a project to train our­selves in the ped­a­gogy and tech­nol­ogy of how to make effec­tive video tuto­ri­als. I’d like to share some of what we’ve learned so far. It has all been new to me, and I hope that oth­ers may ben­e­fit from our efforts.

  A cou­ple of dis­claimers: first, I don’t claim to be an expert in video cre­ation or edu­ca­tional ped­a­gogy. My knowl­edge is still nascent. Sec­ond, I don’t advo­cate video for video’s sake: be sure a video tuto­r­ial is the right medium for your intended goals before jump­ing into the record­ing process. When you want to teach a cer­tain skill or idea, start by ask­ing: how can I best get this infor­ma­tion across? Some­times it will be video, but other times a step-by-step text descrip­tion can be sim­pler and more effec­tive. Although as librar­i­ans we’re always eager to embrace the new tech­nolo­gies, it’s help­ful to remem­ber that the “old” tech­nolo­gies have their strengths as well. Tasks that involve basic, step-by-step instruc­tions may be bet­ter pre­sented as text on a web­page (or – gasp! – handout) that will be eas­ier for stu­dents to fol­low as they com­plete the steps in another browser win­dow. On the other hand, those that involve nav­i­ga­tion through var­i­ous, com­plex online inter­faces may need video be clear. Some­times it’s best to pro­vide infor­ma­tion in both for­mats to pro­vide for dif­fer­ent learn­ing styles.

  Some ped­a­gog­i­cal context

  Two well-known edu­ca­tional psy­chol­o­gists, Richard E. Mayer and Rox­ana Moreno, have writ­ten exten­sively on the cog­ni­tive impli­ca­tions of mul­ti­me­dia learn­ing. Most notable of their writ­ings for our pur­poses is a 2003 arti­cle in Edu­ca­tional Psy­chol­o­gist enti­tled, “Nine Ways to Reduce Cog­ni­tive Load in Mul­ti­me­dia Learn­ing.” The gist of the arti­cle is that the human brain’s abil­ity to process infor­ma­tion is divided into two chan­nels, the ver­bal and the visual. And no mat­ter what our multi-tasking Mil­len­ni­als would have us believe, the brain can process only a lim­ited amount of infor­ma­tion from each chan­nel at any given moment.

  Here’s what the cog­ni­tive process looks like accord­ing to Mayer and Moreno. Infor­ma­tion comes in through those two “chan­nels” of our ears and eyes. From every­thing we take in through our imme­di­ate, sen­sory mem­ory, we select cer­tain words and pic­tures that are processed to our work­ing, or short-term, mem­ory. At that point we begin mak­ing sense out of those pieces: align­ing the images and sounds, orga­niz­ing them into mean­ing, and most impor­tantly, con­nect­ing the results with our prior knowl­edge in a way that will be added to our long-term mem­ory. All of these steps are impor­tant, but per­haps most crit­i­cal here is what hap­pens between the sen­sory mem­ory absorb­ing infor­ma­tion and the work­ing mem­ory orga­niz­ing it: selec­tion. That’s the point where details will be lost unless we are care­ful to pro­vide the most essen­tial infor­ma­tion as clearly and sim­ply as pos­si­ble, to ease the selec­tion process along.

  So our stu­dents need to go through sev­eral steps to make mean­ing out of what we teach them: first, by pay­ing atten­tion; sec­ond, by mak­ing sense out of it; and third, by apply­ing it to what they already know about the topic. As a result, edu­ca­tors using mul­ti­me­dia need to be thought­ful about the amount of infor­ma­tion we’re pro­vid­ing through video and audio chan­nels, and the pace at which we’re pro­vid­ing the infor­ma­tion, to ensure that we’re giv­ing stu­dents enough time to process it in ways that make sense to them. If we pro­vide too much infor­ma­tion at once, we cause cog­ni­tive over­load, at which point our stu­dents shut down, lose inter­est, or oth­er­wise sim­ply stop learning.

  When begin­ning a new video tuto­r­ial, the most crit­i­cal ele­ments are the most basic ones: (i) iden­ti­fy­ing the audi­ence, (ii) deter­min­ing the goal or goals, and (ii) break­ing down the task into its most basic ele­ments. It’s always help­ful to state the video’s goals at the start of a tuto­r­ial, and restate them again at the end to rein­force the mes­sage. The clearer the mes­sage of a video, the less cog­ni­tive load it will require from stu­dents who are try­ing to make sense out of it, and the more brain­power they will have left to process and inter­nal­ize the skills being taught. All of this needs to be taken into account to achieve the goal of mean­ing­ful learn­ing, which Mayer and Moreno define as “deep under­stand­ing of the mate­r­ial, which includes attend­ing to impor­tant aspects of the pre­sented mate­r­ial, men­tally orga­niz­ing it into a coher­ent cog­ni­tive struc­ture, and inte­grat­ing it with rel­e­vant exist­ing knowledge.”

  Prin­ci­ples of mul­ti­me­dia learning

  So how do we take advan­tage of cog­ni­tive the­ory to cre­ate mean­ing­ful learn­ing through video tuto­ri­als? The key is to care­fully review every ele­ment we add to a video to deter­mine whether it is adding to or detract­ing from the viewer’s expe­ri­ence. To help us with this, Moreno and Mayer offer a series of prin­ci­ples on how peo­ple process mul­ti­me­dia, and in the arti­cle I men­tioned above, make nine rec­om­men­da­tions for mul­ti­me­dia instruc­tion based on those prin­ci­ples (these were nicely encap­su­lated by Ross Perkins, Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Edu­ca­tional Tech­nol­ogy at Boise State Uni­ver­sity, in a work­shop he pro­vided for myself and my colleagues):

  1. Split Atten­tion Prin­ci­ple: Stu­dents learn bet­ter when instruc­tion mate­r­ial does not require them to split their atten­tion between mul­ti­ple sources of mutu­ally refer­ring information.
  2. Modal­ity Prin­ci­ple: Stu­dents learn bet­ter when the ver­bal infor­ma­tion is pre­sented audi­to­rily as speech rather than visu­ally as on-screen text both for con­cur­rent and sequen­tial presentations.
  3. Redun­dancy Prin­ci­ple: Stu­dents learn bet­ter from ani­ma­tion and nar­ra­tion than from ani­ma­tion, nar­ra­tion, and text if the visual infor­ma­tion is pro­vided simul­ta­ne­ously to the ver­bal information.
  4. Spa­tial Con­ti­gu­ity Prin­ci­ple: Stu­dents learn bet­ter when on-screen text and visual mate­ri­als are phys­i­cally inte­grated rather than separated.
  5. Tem­po­ral Con­ti­gu­ity Prin­ci­ple: Stu­dents learn bet­ter when ver­bal and visual mate­ri­als are tem­po­rally syn­chro­nized rather than sep­a­rated in time.
  6. Coher­ence Prin­ci­ple: Stu­dents learn bet­ter when extra­ne­ous mate­r­ial is excluded rather than included in mul­ti­me­dia explanations.

  As rec­om­men­da­tions based on these prin­ci­ples, Mayer and Moreno suggest:

  • using nar­ra­tion with­out on-screen text to remove the need for stu­dents to read and lis­ten to text at the same time (called “off-loading”);
  • allow­ing short breaks, or pauses, between sec­tions of a pre­sen­ta­tion (called “segmenting”);
  • start­ing off the pre­sen­ta­tion with lessons about any terms or con­cepts that are new and impor­tant to what they will learn in the video (called “pretraining”);
  • leav­ing out any unnec­es­sary audio or visual ele­ments (called “weeding”);
  • using arrows, high­light­ing, or other cues to the viewer as a means of clar­i­fy­ing impor­tant points or con­fus­ing images (called “signaling”);
  • ensur­ing that on-screen text and images that rely on each other are shown phys­i­cally close together (called “aligning”);
  • remov­ing visual ele­ments that are dupli­cated by nar­ra­tion or graph­ics (called “elim­i­nat­ing redundancy”);
  • main­tain­ing a close match between nar­ra­tion and visual ele­ments shown in the video (called “syn­chro­niz­ing”); and
  • when pos­si­ble, con­sid­er­ing the par­tic­u­lar audi­ence of a video and match­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion style to their learn­ing style(s).

  For instance, con­sider videos that include both ver­bal nar­ra­tion and on-screen text. Pro­vid­ing such duplica­tive infor­ma­tion is likely to bog down a stu­dent by requir­ing them to process the same infor­ma­tion twice, using both ver­bal and visual chan­nels. Mean­while, if the nar­ra­tion and on-screen text is being shown simul­ta­ne­ously with a screen­cast or other video ele­ment, it is likely that the stu­dent will not be able to process this third piece at all. Instead, using ver­bal nar­ra­tion with a screen­cast will prob­a­bly be more effec­tive at keep­ing the student’s cog­ni­tive load man­age­able. Sim­i­larly, when using a screen­cast of a library home­page, keep in mind that the large num­ber of images and links on an aver­age page can also cause over­load. It’s easy to add a large arrow or call-out iden­ti­fy­ing the par­tic­u­lar link you want stu­dents to see, and it will sig­nif­i­cantly reduce the cog­ni­tive demands of the shot. Mayer and Moreno’s oeu­vre includes much more guid­ance on these issues, as does a 2006 arti­cle by Nadaleen Tempelman-Kluit in Col­lege & Research Libraries.

  Plan­ning for video instruction

  With busy lives and jobs, many of us choose to cre­ate video tuto­ri­als on the fly sim­ply by trans­fer­ring strate­gies used at the ref­er­ence desk or one-shot instruc­tion. Hon­estly, we do it every day at the desk, right, so how hard can it be to sim­ply record the same infor­ma­tion? Well, it is harder than one might think when con­sid­er­ing both ped­a­gog­i­cal and cog­ni­tive impli­ca­tions. It’s impor­tant to begin with a plan; a break­down of exactly what the goal(s) of the video will be, how the goal(s) will be achieved, and what exact steps must be shown in the video with­out any unnec­es­sary or dis­tract­ing elements.

  Sto­ry­board­ing is per­haps one of the most under­es­ti­mated but most crit­i­cal parts of the process of cre­at­ing an instruc­tional video. This is the same approach used by film­mak­ers to plan out scenes, props, and actors required in every dif­fer­ent part of a movie. Sto­ry­board­ing does not have to be com­pli­cated or high art, it can sim­ply be a list­ing of what will hap­pen in each scene, in full detail. It requires us to walk through every sec­ond of the video in advance to make sure it is doing what we want it do. Sto­ry­boards can be sketched out on paper or dig­i­tally but should incor­po­rate what­ever will be tak­ing place on the screen visu­ally, the full script that a nar­ra­tor will speak, and an indi­ca­tion of any addi­tional sound or graph­i­cal ele­ments (such as call-outs) that may be included. I’ve just started using Pow­er­Point as a sto­ry­board­ing tool — putting visual ele­ments in the slide sec­tion, and audio in the notes — and fel­low Lead­piper Derik sug­gests post-it notes as a quick and easy method. Sto­ry­boards help in plan­ning a video so that it can be cre­ated in a way that reduces cog­ni­tive load for stu­dents, while also allow­ing us to bud­get our time more effi­ciently in the cre­ation process.

  

  Sto­ry­boards / http://​www​.flickr​.com/​p​h​o​t​o​s​/​c​gc/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

  Because each scene needs to be attended to indi­vid­u­ally, sto­ry­boards are use­ful on another issue in the plan­ning process: remind­ing us to record video in short, man­age­able seg­ments. First, this is help­ful because it cuts out the pre­cious sec­onds that tick by when we are tran­si­tion­ing between pages, such as when search­ing a data­base and wait­ing for the results to come up. Sec­ond, record­ing short seg­ments can be won­der­ful when some­thing in the video needs to be updated later. The web pages and inter­faces we rely on for our library cat­a­logs and research data­bases change fre­quently, which can cre­ate a chal­lenge when try­ing to main­tain video tuto­ri­als that include them. When video clips are kept short, it is easy to re-record part of the video that includes the changed visual ele­ments and drop the new clip into the tutorial.

  Of course, those new clips can only be inte­grated if our method of orga­niz­ing video files and com­pleted tuto­ri­als is clear. It’s easy to let the long list of video clip, screen shot and screen­cast files flow into a vari­ety of fold­ers with­out keep­ing track of them. How­ever, when those files are care­fully tracked and iden­ti­fied (by file­name) on the sto­ry­board, and then all of the raw pro­duc­tion files archived together for future ref­er­ence, main­te­nance and updat­ing sud­denly becomes far eas­ier and far less time consuming.

  The soft­ware

  Many of the best videos incor­po­rate a mix of screen­cast­ing (or screen record­ing), live video from a cam­era, and slide clips. In some cases they may also include extra sound effects or sup­ple­men­tal audio tracks. This can get com­pli­cated when work­ing with so many dif­fer­ent types of files. And, not sur­pris­ingly, there is no per­fect, easy-to-use soft­ware pack­age for video tuto­r­ial cre­ation. Cam­ta­sia Stu­dio from Tech­Smith is gen­er­ally con­sid­ered to be the stan­dard for true video and audio edit­ing. Cam­ta­sia is one of the few pro­grams that accepts a wide vari­ety of audio and video for­mats, and makes it pos­si­ble to edit and inte­grate them in sophis­ti­cated ways. On the down­side it is expen­sive and takes time to learn; after using it for over a year I am just start­ing to feel com­pe­tent in the soft­ware. Cam­ta­sia is avail­able for a 30-day trial, and Tech­Smith pro­vides a num­ber of high-quality (wouldn’t they have to be?) video tuto­ri­als on how to use the software.

  In addi­tion to Cam­ta­sia, there are a num­ber of sim­pler, free pro­grams that make some of the same func­tions pos­si­ble. For screen­cast­ing only, Tech­Smith also pro­vides a pro­gram called Jing that is far sim­pler and more user-friendly than Cam­ta­sia, so that can be a great place to start for those new to video cre­ation. Screen­Toaster is a sim­i­lar pro­gram, but unlike Jing it’s web-based so does not require instal­la­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, nei­ther Jing (free ver­sion) nor Screen­Toaster offer much in the way of edit­ing options, nor do they pro­vide screen­cast­ing files that can be inte­grated with other video clips. When work­ing just with live video from a web­cam or video cam­era, the sim­plest edit­ing options are the default PC and Mac pro­grams: Win­dows Movie Maker and iMovie. Both can be use­ful and make it eas­ier to get started, but they also have more lim­ited options than Cam­ta­sia. For audio edit­ing alone, Audac­ity is a free pro­gram that many use for cre­at­ing sound clips, sound effects, and podcasts.

  The set­tings used dur­ing video cre­ation can have a big impact on the qual­ity of the results. For the best qual­ity, experts rec­om­mend that the res­o­lu­tion of the video record­ing should be as close as pos­si­ble to the final prod­uct. For instance, YouTube’s stan­dard video res­o­lu­tion is 640 pix­els by 480 pix­els, so record­ing should take place at that image size. We’ve all seen screen­cast videos that recorded the individual’s entire screen at a res­o­lu­tion such as 1280×720, pro­duced the video at the same size, and then uploaded the video to YouTube, only to see the video size com­pressed to a degraded and unread­able result. Record­ing at such a high res­o­lu­tion would, how­ever, be appro­pri­ate for YouTube’s High Def­i­n­i­tion video, which uses 1280×720 as the stan­dard. Record­ing size can be changed within the video record­ing soft­ware or cam­era set­tings, or for screen­cast­ing the entire screen res­o­lu­tion can be changed to fit the desired result. It’s impor­tant, too, to be con­sis­tent in record­ing size when using video from sev­eral sources (screen­cast, web­cam, video cam­era, etc.). Over­all, video should be both recorded and pro­duced at what­ever size is needed for the plat­form where it will be viewed in the end.

  Con­clu­sion

  In gen­eral, all of the rec­om­men­da­tions from cog­ni­tive the­ory indi­cate that the sim­pler the video, the bet­ter. The chal­lenge is to bal­ance this sim­plic­ity with our other needs: to cover com­plex mate­r­ial, to cater to var­i­ous learn­ing styles, to be acces­si­ble to hear­ing impaired stu­dents, to work within our often-limited video edit­ing skills, and even to be enter­tain­ing. Instruc­tion through mul­ti­me­dia is highly chal­leng­ing, often frus­trat­ing, and extremely time-consuming, but when done well it can have a dra­matic impact upon stu­dent learning.

  For exam­ple, let’s look at a cou­ple of great exam­ples of videos that are both engag­ing and reflect aware­ness of the ped­a­gog­i­cal and cog­ni­tive con­sid­er­a­tions described above. I’ll start off with a video from Com­mon Craft, a great exam­ple of sim­plic­ity in action:

  Com­mon Craft videos are excel­lent at break­ing down an idea or task into its sim­plest ele­ments and pre­sent­ing them clearly and con­cisely with­out audio or visual dis­trac­tions. They do all this in mere min­utes while main­tain­ing a level of humor and enter­tain­ment through­out to keep view­ers interested.

  Or how about this one? The Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Arling­ton has started a series of “Librar­ian vs. Stereo­type” videos that are engag­ing and infor­ma­tive while still get­ting their mes­sage across:

  Notice the sim­ple white back­ground; the cre­ators of this video omit­ted any dis­trac­tions or visual ele­ments other than the peo­ple on the screen. And it works! Our edu­ca­tional psy­chol­o­gist friends might have rec­om­mended against the back­ground music as a non-essential ele­ment that adds to view­ers’ cog­ni­tive load, but oth­er­wise this is a ter­rific instruc­tional video.

  Now it’s your turn: What are your favorite exam­ples of high qual­ity instruc­tion videos? What have been your expe­ri­ences in try­ing to cre­ate videos for teach­ing? The com­ments below are open for your thoughts, links, and experiences.

  Many thanks to Lead Pipers Ellie Col­lier and Derik Bad­man, as well as my Boise col­leagues Memo Cor­dova and Ellie Dworak, for pro­vid­ing valu­able feed­back on an ear­lier draft of this post.

  Want to learn more? Here are a few places to start:

  • Ganster, L. A., & Walsh, T. R. (2008). Enhanc­ing Library Instruc­tion to Under­grad­u­ates: Incor­po­rat­ing Online Tuto­ri­als into the Cur­ricu­lum. Col­lege & Under­grad­u­ate Libraries, 15(3), 314 – 333.
  • Mayer, R. E., & Moreno, R. (2003). Nine Ways to Reduce Cog­ni­tive Load in Mul­ti­me­dia Learn­ing. Edu­ca­tional Psy­chol­o­gist, 38(1), 43 – 52.
  • Oud, J. (2009). Guide­lines for effec­tive online instruc­tion using mul­ti­me­dia screen­casts. Ref­er­ence Ser­vices Review, 37(2), 164 – 177.
  • Tempelman-Kluit, N. (2006). Mul­ti­me­dia Learn­ing The­o­ries and Online Instruc­tion. Col­lege & Research Libraries, 67(4), 364 – 9.

  You might also be inter­ested in:

  • Nar­rat­ing the “Back Story” Through E-learning Resources in Libraries
  • Pre­sen­ta­tion = Speech + Slides
  • [RE]Boot Camp: Share Some. Learn More. Teach Better.
  • Social Proof: A Tool for Deter­min­ing Authority
  • In Praise of the Inter­net: Shift­ing Focus and Engag­ing Crit­i­cal Think­ing Skills
  Tags: educational theory, instruction, psychology, tutorials, videos

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8 Comments

• Chad says:

  October 14, 2009 at 11:42 am

  Very good dis­cus­sion of tools, meth­ods, and ped­a­gogy. The tools are get­ting eas­ier to use, and it’s become really easy to slap together a video or screen­cast with­out think­ing about it, which I have been guilty of doing myself. Cap­ti­vate and other tools are just like Pow­er­point in that they give the user the abil­ity to make really awe­some or really ter­ri­ble pre­sen­ta­tions. Some­times you don’t need to use every sin­gle fea­ture that the soft­ware has, even though it’s tempt­ing to do so. Hope­fully your post will keep read­ers from using text, arrows, fade-ins, and ani­mated gifs all over their videos.

  While we have Adobe Cap­ti­vate, I spend most of my time mak­ing screen­casts and videos with Cam­stu­dio (open source), my Flip Mino Cam­era, and Win­dows Movie Maker. It’s fairly low tech, but I can usu­ally turn a video around pretty quickly. My sto­ry­board is gen­er­ally based on the ques­tions I get from stu­dents, so I try to make the video for the broad­est audi­ence pos­si­ble. I’m using Blip​.Tv to host the videos, and then embed­ding them on places like this Biz Wiki page.

  I appre­ci­ate the links and fur­ther read­ing you’ve pro­vided, and I’ll def­i­nitely be check­ing those out. Thanks again for a great post.
  –Chad

  Reply
• Ron says:

  October 14, 2009 at 3:05 pm

  This was extremely use­ful, thank you so much.
  BTW, here is a tip to con­vert Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tions to video:
  Smart PPT to Video Converter

  Reply
• Kim Duckett says:

  October 14, 2009 at 4:58 pm

  Thanks, Kim! This is a won­der­ful overview of best prac­tices in instruc­tional video cre­ation! It’s per­fect con­tent to share with librar­i­ans new to video projects as well as a good reminder for those who have been work­ing with video for awhile.

  I par­tic­u­larly appre­ci­ate your great overview of cog­ni­tive load the­ory, which I also view as crit­i­cal to keep in mind (but you sum it up much bet­ter than me).

  I sec­ond your point that video isn’t always the answer. It’s really hot right now and we librar­i­ans are all over it, but it can’t always be the right pack­ag­ing for instruc­tional con­tent. For one thing, a video chan­nels the user’s expe­ri­ence in a lin­ear way when maybe what they really need is to scan text or images for the con­tent that jumps out at them as most help­ful. I think video is good for “show and tell” train­ing (i.e. how to use a tool) and, in some cases, to tell a nar­ra­tive that might be com­pli­cated or over­whelm­ing to read.

  Here’s a great exam­ple of the nar­ra­tive genre that I just came across today:
  Open Access 101

  - Kim

  Reply
• tom says:

  October 15, 2009 at 10:03 am

  this is cool. but man, cre­ation (mean­ing “qual­ity” cre­ation) is really time-consuming. shoot­ing a sim­ple video with nar­ra­tion isn’t too hard with some rehearsal, but this pro­fes­sional pro­duc­tion stuff is a full-time gig. a cou­ple of years ago, I pre­sented a pro­gram for cre­at­ing flash-based instruc­tion using Power­bul­let and Wink (free soft­ware) for sim­ple instruc­tion (the files are still acces­si­ble here, http://​www​.pbcli​brary​.org/​S​E​F​L​I​N​/​e​n​e​r​g​i​z​e​.​htm), but I haven’t got­ten into video edit­ing. before I became a librar­ian, I thought I would be a media spe­cial­ist, so I took a few educ­tion classes, and before that, I thought I could get into TV so I had some pro­duc­tion train­ing, so the the­ory for video pro­duc­tion and instruc­tion is still in my brain, some­where (maybe). and about con­vert­ing ppt to video (re: “Ron says”), I save the slides as size 14.2 x 10.7 jpgs (matches a 1028 x 764 res­o­lu­tion screen) then use Nero Vision­Ex­press that came with my DVD-burner to make video shows with pretty-good slide tran­si­tions. I have one in VCD for­mat that plays on a cheap DVD player and it runs all day on an old TV in the teen area. (sorry, to go on so long..) thanks again.

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• Ellie says:

  October 15, 2009 at 1:36 pm

  Fan­tas­tic arti­cle Kim. Thanks for sum­ma­riz­ing and shar­ing. I think more of us could also be using what’s already out there and good as opposed to cre­at­ing new mediocre. Going on some of the col­lab­o­ra­tion ideas from Jean’s post, I’d love to see a curated repos­i­tory of exem­plary instruc­tion videos that would could direct stu­dents to. I know there are a num­ber of places col­lect­ing instruc­tion videos, and even specif­i­cally library instruc­tion, but I haven’t seen one with a qual­ity con­trol mech­a­nism or with explicit please copy this licensing.

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  • Derik Badman says:

    October 15, 2009 at 2:59 pm

    Even bet­ter, a repos­i­tory of the videos as raw mate­r­ial (video clips, audio clips), so that dif­fer­ent libraries could remix their own ver­sion (with their own spe­cific logos/peculiarities… kind of like NIN releas­ing songs for fans to remix in Garageband.

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• Friday Link Round Up « ellie <3 libraries says:

  October 16, 2009 at 3:26 pm

  […] Learn­ing to teach through video […]

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• Nadaleen says:

  November 2, 2009 at 9:02 am

  This is a great sum­mary, thanks! Also, thanks for the shoutout-I’m Nadaleen, author of: Tempelman-Kluit, N. (2006). Mul­ti­me­dia Learn­ing The­o­ries and Online Instruc­tion. Col­lege & Research Libraries, 67(4), 364  –  9.
  I love the Com­mon Craft video exam­ples as a good exam­ple of less is more. I actu­ally tried a few of these type of videos for the library, and the process high­lighted just how hard they are to make, and how much exper­tise they involve.

  Here’s an exam­ple of me and one other per­son muck­ing about to make pretty awful Com­mon Craft *type* vidoes with library con­tent: http://​www​.nyu​.edu/​l​i​b​r​a​r​y​/​r​e​s​o​u​r​c​e​s​/​n​t​k​/​m​o​v​i​e​/​t​e​a​c​h​i​n​g​_​l​i​b​.​h​tml

  Just as we-Instructional Design Librarians-aren’t trained in learn­ing the­ory, we are also not tech­ni­cal experts in all things. I think to make such videos great, you’d need to work with a graphic designer and filmaker.

  Any­way, food for thought and thanks again for a great post!

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