This post is the first of many targeted at current and future college educators who are interested in learning produce and use videos in their college classroom. My hope is to share much of what I have learned about this process over the last 10 years of my career and save you time in your own journey of producing educational videos for in-class use.
Let me start with this statement: producing video is hard. In fact, my daily teaching responsibilities would be much less intense if I skipped this habit completely.
To date, I have produced 547 videos with well over 50 hours of filmed content for at least four different classes. In this work, I find that video production involves a minimum of about a 10-to-1 scaling factor: for one minute of content, I spend at least 10 minutes of work to produce that video in it’s finalized form. In other words, if I want to produce video to capture 60 minutes of content, I might spend at least 600 minutes (10 hours) producing this content.
Moreover, once I have actually created the videos, their very existence often leads to much more nuanced questions about how to design the learning environment in my courses to effectively use these resources. Video provide a starting point for the much larger and more challenging project of helping my students create significant learning experiences in my classes.
You might be asking:
“So, Jeff, you say that video production takes a ton of energy and that video represents a small fraction of the learning environment in the course. Why spend the energy necessary to produce video?”
My first statement to you is: to get an answer to this question, don’t focus 100% of your attention on videos. Instead, dedicate focused energy thinking critically about your teaching philosophy and how videos fit into your approach to teaching and learning.
With that in mind, I invite you to answer some foundational questions about your larger teaching philosophy:
1. What does it mean to be a good teacher?
2. How do I define my work as an educator?
3. What do I believe about students in my classes?
4. Why do I do this job?
5. Why do I want to use videos in my classes?
6. How do videos relate to my answers to questions 1 – 4 above?
I know: you thought I was going to present a silver bullet that showed how to create engaging videos and completely transformed you classroom and your career. If I had such insight, I’d bottle it, make a billion dollars, and then lobby our national, state, and local governments to spend more money on education.
Sadly, this process is much more nuanced.
The more time I spend producing videos, the more I believe that it’s not the videos themselves that help students learn. It’s how I use the videos and how I think about these tools as part of my larger approach to teaching that makes a difference. So, it is only fitting that in our first post on this subject, I encourage you to spend time reflecting on your teaching philosophy. In the next posts, I’ll highlight my current answers to the questions above and start explain how I think about videos in my own career.
Jeff Anderson 