Why a video? How many YouTube videos have you watched this week? Cooking or craft videos on Facebook? Instagram videos? We are a visual society, so let's make use of that in our online classes. A course introduction video is a simple way to get started.
Producing your own video also personalizes your online course. In the classroom, students see you, but in an online course, particularly one that relies heavily on auto-graded publisher content, students can lose sight of the fact that there is an instructor. Producing a course introduction video is a good way for you to remind them that you are there to help, even virtually.
Course Overview Video
A course overview video is a short, 2-3 minute video that tells the students what to expect in the course. You should include content like the following:
- Content overview
- Description of course activities
- When work is due
- How to get started
Spark Video is a simple, free way to take still images, combine them with icons and text, add your narration, and quickly produce a simple video introduction to your course. In addition to the web site, you can use the Spark Video app on your phone, and upload your finished video to YouTube. I explain how to use Spark Video in this blog post, or you can take a self-paced workshop from Adobe.
In this video, I combined public domain images with screen captures from Blackboard Learn to show students what to expect in my course. I include a link to this YouTube video as an announcement available on the first day of the class.
Course Tour Video
If you are feeling a little more adventurous, you can do a video tour of your course. A video tour is more specific than an overview and involves using screen recording software. You use the student preview feature in Learn to go through your course as a students, and explain what they need to do to complete the course. This is particularly useful for courses with different types of assignments or that use publisher web sites for some work and Learn for other work.Course tours will be longer than course introductions, because you are giving more specific, detailed information. They should still be no longer than the 5-7 minute range to increase the likelihood that students will watch the entire video. But remember, this is just a tour; you want to give details on WHAT to do to complete the course, not HOW to do it. You can create demonstration videos for that.
Here is my Course Tour for PSY 102:
For this video, I used Screencast-o-matic. This site has a free version, where you are limited to videos no longer than 15-minutes (if you are making videos that long, you need to shorten them) with a watermark, or a paid version with no time limit and no watermark. I opted for the paid version at $10 a year, because I do a lot of screencasting and I wanted to not have the watermark, but the free version is good if you are only doing a few.
After I made the screencast, I saved it to my computer, and then edited it with Adobe Premiere Pro. I was able to cut out unneeded parts and add titles and overlays. Again, we have this for free on campus, but you can get a low-cost subscription license through the college for all of the Adobe Creative Cloud products for use at home. Adobe offers many courses to learn how to use their software; I've taken several, and that's how I learned to use Premiere Pro. Here are a couple of courses you can take to Learn about Premiere Pro:
- Digital Literacy Course (25 hours; starts 1/6/2017)
- Skill Builder: Digital Video for Education (10 hours; start 2/20/2017
- Premiere Pro Workshop (self-paced)
You could also use Adobe Premiere Clip on your phone or tablet. Clip is a simple video editor that allows you to cut out unneeded part and add title frames to your video. However, you cannot add overlays.
Here's a nice introduction to Adobe Premiere Clip:
Finally, if you just want to edit out the unneeded part, you can use YouTube's video editing features. I explain how to do that in this blog post.
Course Demonstration Video
While Blackboard provides a lot of good videos for students to learn how to use Learn, they are pretty general in nature. Sometimes students benefit from more specific information about how to complete assignments in your course. You can use screencasting to tell them how to use the Blackboard Learn tool to complete the specific assignment. Here is a video where I tell students how to complete their weekly In the News blog:This is much more specific to their assignment in my course than the Blackboard video about the Blog tool. I also created videos about how to comment on other blog postings, how the blogs are graded, how to take their weekly quizzes, and how to submit critical thinking assignments. I put links to these videos in my Getting Started area in my course, as you can see from my Course Tour video.
You can create these the same way you create a course tour, but they should be shorter in length, no more than 4-5 minutes. You are teaching student how to do one thing, and one thing only. Keeping the video short increases the chances of them watching the whole video and going back to rewatch it if they need to.
Three short videos are better than one long one. In the case of my blog tutorials, I did one on how to submit the blog, one on how to comment on other blogs, and one on the rubric I use to grade them. If strudents just need to find out how to comment on other blogs or have a question about grading, it is easier for them to find that information directly, rather than trying to fast-forwar through a 10-minute video that covers things they don't need to know right away.
Course Introduction Learning Activity
If you want to increase the likelihood of your students watching your videos, try incorporating them into a learning activity. You could just add a short quiz in Learn about the content of the video, or use Office Mix to integrate your video into a narrated PowerPoint with embedded questions. Office Mix is a free add-on to PowerPoint that helps you create more interactive presentations. Although Mix is very easy to use, the Office Mix site has some very good tutorials to learn to details.Here is my Mix I created using the Course tour video for PSY 102
By watching these videos and completing the learning activity students will have a much better understanding of what is required of them to complete my course. Although it does take some time to produce these videos (it took me about a day to make all of my videos and to create my Mix), you can use them over and over. In fact, I can use many of these videos from one course to another, and once I've done one course tour, to second and third become easier.
I hope you'll consider adding an introductory video to your courses, whether it is a simple overview, a more in depth tour, or a full blown learning activity. Any one of these will help your learners understand how to complete your courses successfully, ensuring that their grades reflect their understanding of the content of the course, not the mechanics of learning online.
