MY OWN SCREENCAST JOURNEY
As an educator myself, I spent several years developing screencasts and making mistakes along the way. I was fed up with lecturing and was determined to find a better way to tailor my instruction to students’ needs. I knew technology could be a powerful tool to amplify my impact, but I wasn’t willing to replace my lectures with a disembodied voice on a screen who didn’t know my students. So five years ago, I made the commitment to eliminate lectures from my classroom and replace them with instructional videos I created myself. This allowed me to facilitate a blended, self-paced, mastery-based classroom built on the backbone of high quality feedback and differentiated instruction:
Years later, I left the classroom to launch The Modern Classrooms Project, a nonprofit that equips and empowers educators to create blended, self-paced, mastery-based classrooms of their own. Through our in-person trainings and our Modern Classroom Essentials* course, we have supported teachers as they learn how to:
- Plan and record their own instructional videos
- Build student-friendly websites for instructional content
- Design effective self-paced learning experiences for students at all levels
The following tips align with what we teach participants about creating their own instructional videos.
START WITH THE RESEARCH
When launching distance learning and meeting students’ needs, it can be tempting to dive head first into instructional video creation without actually understanding what works. But before you start investing countless hours of time and energy constructing videos, it’s important to understand what the research says about cultivating engagement.
VIDEO LENGTH
The research on how long instructional videos should be is incredibly clear and tells a simple narrative: Keep it short. The ideal length should be under 6 minutes. Between 6 and 9 minutes, engagement drops slightly.
After 9 minutes, engagement drops considerably, and if your video is over 12 minutes, you have a real problem on your hands. It is important to note that the majority of these studies have been conducted on young adults, so for younger students try to keep it 6 minutes or under (Brame, 2015).
These time recommendations can make educators anxious. It can be hard to imagine how to synthesize concepts or skills in such a short span of time. One of the beauties of instructional video creation is it forces you to think about delivering content in a lean way. What is essential? What is not? And where can students discover the content for themselves without you walking them through the process?
A simple way to make videos short is by chunking more frequently. Educators are used to thinking about lessons in 45-, 60-, or 90-minute blocks of time. When you use instructional videos, those constraints disappear. A 10-minute lecture that is designed as part of a 60-minute lesson can be chunked into two 5-minute videos, each of which then becomes part of a 30-minute lesson (Ibrahim et al., 2012).
It also helps to speak quickly and enthusiastically. Teachers are used to speaking slowly and enunciating very clearly, but that is not necessary in a screencast; in fact, it can be quite boring. Instead, speak fast and use conversational language to bring your authentic self into the picture (Guo et al., 2014). Don’t worry that students won’t be able to follow if you speak too quickly; they can always rewind the video and watch sections again. And don’t be afraid to make mistakes—a few of these will make your video sound more genuine.
VIDEO DESIGN
Next, let’s talk about design principles. First off, minimize text (Guo et al., 2014). Nothing is less engaging than an instructional video with a whole bunch of typed up text. It is especially redundant when you simply read the text during the recording. You might as well just send them a document and have them read it over instead. When possible, always accompany what you say with visuals (Brame, 2015).
Second, instructional videos do not need to be pretty; they need to be personal. Your students want to hear from you; otherwise you could just send them existing videos from YouTube. Research has shown that engagement increases when students know their own teacher is behind the screen delivering the instruction (Li et al., 2016).
Lastly, interactivity is engaging. Embedding pop-up questions into your videos provides great checks for understanding. Moreover, accompanying videos with guided notes helps kids stay focused and ensures that the information travels with them to their next task or assignment (Lawson et al., 2006; Vural, 2013; Zhang et al., 2006).
From Cult of Pedagogy, here.