Let’s face it, recording a 50 min lecture in your office is exhausting for you and exhausting for your students watching the final product. The reality is many of your students probably won’t even manage to view the entire recording (see ‘TiPs: Achieving 100% engagement through interactive video lectures’). Instead, take the opportunity provided by the asynchronous mode of delivery and step away from your office and record yourself outside or in a setting relevant for the content of your lecture.
Presenting yourself in an office or even in a recording studio introduces a level of formality that can reduce your capacity to make a personal connection with students in your course (Pacansky-Brock et al. 2020; Cavanagh 2019). By simply recording yourself in a setting other than your office, students tend to view you more as a real person, not as cold and distant (Creasman 2014). Better yet, take the opportunity provided by pre-recorded lectures and select a setting that relates to the topic of your lecture. For example, if you’re discussing fluid dynamics, record your lecture in the Royal National Park next to Hacking River, or if it’s on the gig-economy record yourself in the financial district in the city.
In my 3rd year BIOS3011 Animal Behaviour course, I went one step further and produced a series of mini-lectures, or ‘Lectures From the Field’, recorded on location while doing fieldwork in Guam, Borneo, Malaysia and outback Australia. Each video (7-15 minutes) introduces topics using evocative animal examples such as amphibious fish and gliding lizards. I show how the skills students are taught in the course’s practicals are relevant to real-world issues. The series also highlights my research and shows me as a practicing scientist actively researching the topics presented in the course.
Students routinely comment on the lecture series in myExperience evaluations, e.g.:
“I really loved the ‘lectures from the field’ section. It was cool to see all the places Terry has done research and made the subject more interesting as we could see how the theoretical stuff can be done in practice.”
This 'Lectures From the Field' series is now hosted on the U.S. Animal Behavior Society YouTube channel with various foreign language subtitles and English-captioned versions of each episode. These can be used by any university level course on animal behaviour, ethology, and behavioural ecology. Point being, if you spend a bit of time on your lecture recordings, you can increase your reach by offering them to others outside of your home institution.
All you need is a video camcorder and tripod, or just your smart phone propped against some structure, and you’re good to go. If you want something fancy, you can use virtually any video editing software to storyboard your lecture with cut-aways and other graphics. For example, I use UNSW’s licence for Adobe Premiere. Alternatively, contact the EdTech folks at PVCESE and they’ll be happy to help cut your video content up into a coherent sequence that is more video story than boring lecture.
Here’s a two minute video illustrating the basics, followed by one of the Lecture From the Field episodes I created for my course:
References used:
Cavanagh SR. 2019. How to make your teaching more engaging. The Chronicle of Higher Education, published online 11/3/19.
Creasman, P A 2014. Considerations in online course design. IDEA Paper #52.
Pacansky-Brock M, Smedshammer M, Vincent-Layton K. 2020. Shaping the futures of learning in the digital age: humanizing online teaching to equities higher education. Current Issues in Education 21:1-20