These videos are based on the concept of the micro-lecture, a short video, focused on one topic, and often incorporated into assignments or learning activities. Micro-lectures make use of the research into optimal video length that says instructional videos should be 6-10 minutes in length for most audiences, although there is some research that says millenials are willing to watch longer videos as long as they are content-heavy, engaging, and meet their needs. These videos are shorter than that because they are not incorporated into learning activities; they are just giving the students information, not asking students to interact with the information.
The first I did in about 15 minutes in the morning, after seeing a question in my astronomy course about the super blue blood moon.
I used Spark Video to create this one, and most of the time was spent doing the narration. All of the images are from the free photo search within Spark (who knew you could find such a variety of images of the full moon). I created and recorded the video on my phone, because its microphone is better than on my laptop, and I did most of it while brewing my morning coffee!
Spark is a free product from Adobe; all you need is a Creative Cloud account. You can get a free CC account, but if you get a paid account, you get some premium features for Spark- and if you are an LCCC faculty member, you can get a paid account for about $10 a YEAR (as opposed to the educator price of $20 a MONTH). I wrote about how to use Spark video about a year and a half ago. It was one of the first products I learned about when I started taking the Adobe Generation Professional courses a couple of years ago, and it is my go to product for creating short, informative videos.
The second one I also did in about 15 minutes by recording a quick video using my web cam, making a few edits, and uploading the result to YouTube. I do these "Weekly Updates" periodically throughout the semester, maybe 4 or 5 times, just to check in with the students.
I created a title screen using Spark Post, another member of the web and app-based Spark family from Adobe. I use this layout for most of my extemporaneous videos, so I just need to change the text, and then download the image. Like Video, Post is free to use with a free Creative Cloud account,but you need to have a paid account to be able to remove the Spark branding. Then I added that to the video and added a couple of transitions using Adobe's video editing software, Premiere Pro.
However, you can get the same result on your phone. You can record yourself on your phone, use the Spark Post app to create a title slide, and then use Adobe video editing mobile app, Adobe Premiere Clip to put the two together and even add a music track to your video. You can upload to YouTube through the YouTube mobile app as well. Once I have it in YouTube, I just need to embed the video into a content item in my course, in this case an announcement. I can even do that from my phone!
The last one I did by narrating a short PowerPoint. Students in my Physical Science class tend to have the same misconception about air resistance and gravity, so I decided it was easier to narrate a video than write the same feedback over and over on their assignment.
This took about an hour to make, because I had to actually create the PowerPoint slides. However, now that it's done, I can use it in future semesters, and I will actually save time overall by just linking to the video to provide feedback to students rather than trying to explain to them what they did wrong.
Again, I wrote about narrating PowerPoint and saving it as a video a couple of years ago using Office 2010. The process is similar with Office 2016, although it is slightly different with Office 365. Once I created the video, I uploaded it to YouTube, and I was able to embed it into the assignment feedback when I graded these online labs.
So in about an hour and a half, or a fraction of the time it took me to explain how I did them in this blog, I created three videos for my online courses. Yes, yes, I know, I can hear it already, "But Karen, you do this all the time, it would take me forever to do any of this!" And you are right, the first few times I did these videos, it took me a long time to do them. Creativity is hard work. But I kept doing them, and now, a few hundred videos later, I can do them quickly. And my online courses are now more interactive, more engaging, and more effective for my students - and they know there is a teacher teaching their course, not a computer.
