• Best Practice
• Keep it short
• Build depth and nuance with existing video content and your own informal video announcements and updates.
• Incorporate Active-Learning Techniques
• Assess student understanding
• Common Pitfalls
• Don't over produce it
• Don't try to wing it
• Don't let perfect get in the way of done
• Don't try too hard, just be yourself
• Prioritize the videos that YOU want to make, and fill in gaps with videos you borrow from peers or find online.
• Everything does not belong solely in video
• Reference

Best Practice

Keep it short

Video duration is highest indicator of engagement. Plan to chunk your videos to shorter than 6 minutes in length. Studies show that videos of 9 minutes in length or longer get less than 50% total engagement. Videos of 3 minutes and shorter get the highest. (Guo, Philip J., et al, pg.4)

Build depth and nuance with existing video content and your own informal video announcements and updates.

Source clips from any number of media forms and outlets ranging from TED Talks to popular films. Add timely clarification with authentic casual video clips you record. Remember the significance of nonverbal cues to communicate effectively. Find and create video content to bring these cues into the otherwise isolating online classroom.

Incorporate Active-Learning Techniques

Using active-learning techniques within videos or as an accompaniment to the videos encourages students to intentionally engage with video lecture content. It is highly encouraged to add accountability by combining any video with some sort of homework or discussion question to answer while watching the video (M. Kim, Kim, Khera, & Getman, 2014)

Assess student understanding

Students are usually overconfident when watching videos. You could encourage retrieval practice in aiding retention of the information being taught in video by sprinkling assessment question during the video and at the end.

Common Pitfalls

Don't over produce it

Spending money on a fancy webcam, microphone, and finding the perfect lighting will do little to increase engagement. Keep it simple.

Don't try to wing it

Recording video could be deceptively time consuming to make, but you could reduce that time and the quality of the content by making yourself an outline and finding a collection of visuals you would like to share.

Don't let perfect get in the way of done

Early on when I started making videos for a coding class that I taught, I would be 5 minutes into the video, try to compile my code and it would fail. The perfectionist side of me would grab hold, I would delete the video, and start all over. Five minutes quickly spiral into thirty. Multiply that by the total amount of videos I wanted to create and you have hours of wasted effort. Instead embrace the mistakes. I've learned to use my mistakes as a teachable moment. Now, when that happens (and it does...often), I start to think aloud while I debug the problem. Usually I will find the issue quickly, but if not I will just slice the debugging section down with iMovie.

Don't try too hard, just be yourself

While it may sound cliche, it is very easy to inadvertently change the way you present yourself when on camera. This usually manifests as slowing down your speech and over-enunciating. It takes practice, but do your best to keep your normal tone, and let your personality shine through as it does in the classroom. This is easier said than done when you are staring at a camera and not group of smiling faces.

Prioritize the videos that YOU want to make, and fill in gaps with videos you borrow from peers or find online.

I still struggle with this. Teaching at a university I have 26 students that have placed themselves in tremendous debt to hear ME talk about the subject matter, and then I end up sending them to watch a video of some other person on Youtube. The reality is that you probably won't be able to video record every single lesson so you will need to prioritize what you work on first, and slowly build up your library.

My suggestion would be to team up with another teacher that teaches the same grade-level. Divide and concur to reduce the amount of videos you need to produce, and spend time engaging with students.

Everything does not belong solely in video

Something that I learned early on, when making my own video lectures was that not all content works well in a video medium. When picking a medium to share with students think about how you plan for the content to be used, and whether the affordances offered by the medium helps or hinders that job. An examples I've run into include:

When designing a coding course, I was teaching all the content in a video format assuming that students would just play it through. Weeks later a student opened up to me and told me that the videos were really difficult to use as a reference because they would need to scrub through the video until they found the relevant section, and that took a lot of time. What was meant to be easier for students turned out to slow them down.

Learning from my mistakes I ended up mixing text and video typing up content using

• http://www.notion.so
• https://www.gitbook.com/

Alternatively, you could also use Google Doc and embed videos into those documents.

Reference

Darby, Flower. Small Teaching Online (p. 69). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

Guo, Philip J., et al. “How Video Production Affects Student Engagement” Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale Conference - L@S 14, 2014, doi:10.1145/2556325.2566239.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED588350.pdf