Providing your course material with video can both facilitate learning and increase the commitment of your students.

Pedagogical concept like the "flipped classroom model" allows students to learn in their own pace, it encourages students to actively engage with lecture material, it frees up actual class time for more effective.

Key advantages of video lectures

To make online education more engaging and effective, video lectures will be critical. The good news is: Gen Z is very video-savvy. They subscribe to streaming services, watch Youtube everyday, and 70% Gen Z say watching videos with others helps them feel more connected.

Easy to access anytime: With video lectures, your students can learn anywhere from their mobile devices: laptops, tablets or smartphones
Learn whenever you want: Let your students enjoy the process of learning whenever they want. Upload your video lectures to Canvas and send your students a message.

Learning at an individual pace: Every teacher knows that each student has his own pace of learning. With video lectures, all students can learn at their own individual pace, which will maximize the results of online learning.
More effective learning: If a student happens to miss one of your lectures, you can send him the link to the lecture video or make it available in your Canvas Course Room. This allows all your students to keep up with the curriculum.
Chance for self-testing: Video lectures can be especially useful for yourself. Using the recording of the lecture, you can take a look at your presenting skills to find out what can be improved.

When recording a video

1. Improve video quality

We’re not recommending Netflix-quality video content, of course. But when a video is clear, consistent and pleasant to watch, students are more likely to persist. This can be achieved with minimal equipment and effort.

If you can use a good webcam to shoot, position it at eye-level with a good view of your face
Ensure that the camera is focusing properly
Get a USB microphone or a good headset for recording, this helps eliminate background noise and capture your voice
Find a location with natural lighting or at least good lightning and a clean background
Before you record your lecture, make sure to rehearse a few times.

2. Structure your content to suit asynchronous learning

The biggest advantage of a recorded lecture is that students can learn from it over and over. Even those students who are absent or late to live lectures can learn at their own convenience.

To make it long-lasting, take the time to structure it properly. Begin with a brief outline of the lesson with learning objectives. Speak slowly and clearly to the camera. Remember that students can play your videos back, rewind or pause, if they’re stuck. So, you need to repeat yourself, but be clear. And add specific keywords to the slides, which will help them navigate the videos later.

Summarize key points at the end to enable better recall. Include exercises at the end of each lesson for students to practice their learnings. They can also bring their exercises back to the next class and discuss with each other.

3. Be inclusive

Many students with physical or mental disabilities may find it difficult to pay attention throughout a live lecture. Those with learning disabilities like ADHD might find it hard to focus. Video lectures have the opportunity to offer freedom and choice to disadvantaged students. Inclusive recorded lectures let students be in control of the lesson and learn at their own pace. To make your lectures inclusive:

Add closed captions and transcriptions for the hearing impaired
Use fonts and colors that are suitable for the visually impaired

4. Break lectures into smaller units

Studies suggest that videos less than 15 minutes in length work best. Longer lecture content is generally laborious and ineffective. To capture student interest, break your lessons into smaller videos; focus on one complete topic in each video. Arrange videos in a logical sequence so every next lecture builds on the previous.

5. Make it exciting with multimedia elements

Gifs, infographics, memes, videos — there are plenty of engaging content formats that you can use to teach. While recording video lectures, look beyond the standard slides you use towards alternative formats. Include polls, quizzes etc. to keep students focussed.

This can be done in LTU-Play (Kaltura).

6. Make it collaborative

One of the key challenges of recorded video lectures is that it offers little to no agency for the students in learning. This doesn't have to be the case. It is not uncommon for educators to invite students to develop lectures for small topics that they can share with each other — this encourages peer-to-peer collaboration and learning.

If that seems like a step too far, consider working collaboratively with other teachers in your school. Invite experts or practitioners to record guest lectures on specific topics.

7. Activate students

Try to activate students before, under and after they watch a video. Think about the framework "ICAP". Ad exercises, discussions, checklist, reflection questions etc to make the learning more active och social. In this way the student will have a deeper understanding of the content presented in the video.

Example:

Before the video you can let student discuss or reflect on what they already know about the subject or what expectation they have
While waching the video you can let the student take notes of Key topics or write question
After the video let the students discuss their notes or questions

Tips

1. Yourself in the picture

In addition to giving your video a more personal appeal where students see who you are, it is important for those who use lip reading.

2. Script

Videos where you follow a script become all the more core and it becomes easier to follow your thought paths if, for example, you have an introduction, an in-depth study and a summary. You can also attach your script in connection with your video.

3. Stand-alone videos

In your video: do not refer to the next video or other material. In this way, you can subsequently reorganize how you present the material, it becomes easier to correct and the videos can be reused. Maybe they will even be useful in other, new contexts?

4. Subtitles

When your video is finished you need to upload it to LTU-play.

There you can Order Captions.

See how to do it on the next page

Support

If you have any questions any time during the course address them here : Support forum