October 13th at 530 PST Myself, Lisa Ceja, and Elise Legaspi are going to talk about making short instructional videos.

Link to events page

Video

With blended learning and flipped classrooms teachers are creating videos for their students to watch. I am a perpetual student, I received my masters degree online and am working on my doctorate online. Online classes almost always have videos to watch. Videos drive me crazy. I am stuck at the speed of the presenter, who seems to oftentimes forget it is a video so they do not need to repeat themselves and they do not need to go slow.

No matter the medium, you must design for student engagement.

A video that starts with “hi, today we are going to talk about…” RUN AWAY! You lost me, I can not watch that video. Link to my blog post “Hi… and Other Boring Ways to Start a Video.” You need to hook your viewer into the video. The first few seconds should be energetic and get the viewer excited to watch the video.

Flipped Videos

I am going to be honest, when I hear a teacher tell me they are flipping their class the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. 20-minute recordings of math videos are NOT FUN! This is worse than being talked to in class.

10-minute videos are not better.

SHORT Videos

One minute or less! LESS!!!! You do not have to do the whole thing in one take! Make a series of videos. A 59-second video on Facebook has significantly higher engagement rates than a 1-minute video. In fact, the magic number apparently is 22 seconds.

You can not skim a video. You can not easily find that “one spot.” Long videos are not respecting student time.

The Challenge

When I create my videos in one shot I pause, I think about what I am going to say, I ramble. I have a lot of seconds that could be edited out. Record yourself saying the information you are trying to get across. Now do it again in 30 second or less segments (Mine are usually about 12 seconds.) Put together in a playlist. Compare the total run time. Same content. My 20-minute video went down to 7 minutes!