I gave a talk today about using short videos in teaching, to the Aberystwyth University Teaching and Learning conference (info here). The conference is an annual event which serves as a showcase for best practice in the uni, and it’s always interesting to see what people are up to. As part of my prep for the talk I did a lot of thinking about the different uses of video in learning and teaching, and about the different types of video I’ve put together. So I thought I’d do a blog post about that.
If you’re interested in the how, as well as the what and why, you can find my slides on Google Drive here.
Uses of video
Illustration of a visual point: some things are just best illustrated with a picture or a video. There are lots of examples of this in computer vision, here’s one showing a moving average motion detection. This is really hard to do in slides, without video.
Illustration of a phenomenon that is kinda hard to do in person: sometimes – maybe because things are dangerous, or there’s a piece of kit that’s really expensive, it can be difficult to “take the students to the phenomenon”. So video is a way of bringing the phenomenon to the students. An example of this is a video I made for a friend from the Welsh Crucible program, whose wife was teaching Sylvia Plath’s bee poems to her 6th formers – I called the video Beekeeping for poets. It’s a bit scrappy but it gets the ideas across. This was a very early foray into video making for me, so it’s not got sound or anything. But I like it anyway.
Illustration of a concept I find tricky: sometimes I’m just not that confident about a particular topic. Particularly with the details of algorithms that get complex, I often worry about tripping up in a lecture. These topics are also topics that students probably want to revisit more than once, so the video serves several purposes: it gives me a bit of breathing space and additional confidence in the lecture, and it also gives the students an easy way to repeat the difficult bit. An example of this is my DES encryption video from information security section of CS270. Graphically it’s not great, but practically, it’s saved me a lot of stress:-)
These three videos also illustrate three different types of video: the screencast, the video-clips-and-captions, and the canned presentation.
Other reasons to use video include summarisation, previews, simplifications, and the option to introduce new voices. One thing I really want to look into in the future is bringing in interviews with practitioners, probably by recording Skype/Hangouts calls.