Engaging Students:

Video Creation Made Simple

By Holley Baker, Instructional Designer and Courtney Line, Instructional Designer

Student engagement is challenging even under the best of circumstances, so how do you capture the attention of your distracted students? Educational technology can help you create an interactive learning environment, but it can be overwhelming at times. Luckily, one of the most popular categories of ed-tech is also a familiar one: videos. When you include videos in your online class, you can capture your students' attention, trigger reflective discussions, and even show them things you couldn't in a traditional classroom. Welcome messages and announcement videos can help you streamline the administrative side of your job, freeing you to focus on teaching your students. Most of all, videos connect you to your students by establishing your presence in the virtual classroom.

In this article, we are going to discuss some different ways that you can make videos using the resources that are available to you. Before we do, however, we would like to go over some fundamentals of setting up your shot.

Check your background - Take a look at the environment around you before you begin recording. Is there enough light? Sit in front of the camera and look at the background behind you. Do you have any furniture or decorations sticking out of the top of your head? Checking your background helps you eliminate anything that might distract your students from your message.

Listen for sounds - Another thing that you want to pay attention to is sound. Most laptops have internal mics that work very well, but you want to make sure that there are no background noises when you record. A loud refrigerator, TV, or nearby construction can distort your audio and make it difficult to understand.

Plan out what you want to say before you start recording - Write a script or an outline that you can refer to while you record. Even if you do not strictly follow it, an outline will give you something to get you back on track if you draw a blank while you're recording your video.

Remember to have fun - Imagine that the camera is your most engaged student: the one who is excited about this class and cannot wait to get started. Reach out to that student and don't forget, if you make a mistake you can always start over.

There are several methods of capturing video that are available to you either as freeware or as software through the University. Below are a few of the options and how they could be beneficial to you.

Mediasite - Mediasite is a software download available to you through the University. It is easy to learn and use and is available to use at your convenience. It is also integrated with a file management system that allows you to share your videos seamlessly. It allows you to present a PowerPoint while recording your video and audio at the same time. One of the biggest benefits of Mediasite is that we have on-campus support for this product.

Collaborate Ultra - Collaborate Ultra is not marketed or used as a video capturing software, but it is certainly available to be used to record lectures. Collaborate Ultra is made as a synchronous meeting tool and is completely integrated with Blackboard. There is no software to download. It does have the capability for you to present a PowerPoint as you are lecturing.

Smart-Phone - While smart-phones don't allow you to present a PowerPoint or files within your recording, it is an easy method to record quick videos. This is a great method to use if you are wanting to take your class on a video field trip, do interviews, and even welcome messages or announcements.

YouTube or Facebook Live - Both of these tools allow for both synchronous and asynchronous lectures. There is unlimited storage with these videos.

Premiere Rush - Adobe Premier Rush is available to you as a University employee. It is a software download that allows you to record video using your smartphone or computer. It is a bit more advanced than the other options and is not recommended for someone who doesn't have as much experience in the video production world. It does not allow you to import a PowerPoint presentation file but does allow you to import individual images. Premiere Rush is a great tool if you are wanting to really do more post-production editing of your videos.

Now that we have given you several options to be able to capture your video, there is one more step that is so important to know and do. While it is easy to just throw up a video into your Blackboard shell, this is highly discouraged. Videos take up a lot of space and our Blackboard courses have limited space. So to share our videos in our courses, we will need to publish our videos to an outside source and just share the link into your course. Again, there are several different methods of doing this and these are our recommendations for this.

Mediasite- Mediasite is a file-storage server that is available to all University Faculty. Mediasite server is integrated with Blackboard making the file sharing very easy. It is also very easy to record using the Mediasite Recording software and directly add the video to your

YouTube - YouTube allows you to upload your video file to their server. You can choose to make the video private or public depending on your desires. You can then share the link to your video file into your course. The best thing about YouTube is that it will create auto-captions for your video. You will just need to go in and check to make sure the punctuation and grammar are correct.

Collaborate Ultra - Collaborate Ultra allows you to record your lectures and share them with students at a later date. These recordings are saved on an external server and you are given a link to be able to share with students later.

While we know there are many options out there for video, these are but a few ways you can create videos for your hybrid and fully-online classes. We encourage you to experiment with each of the strategies outlined here to find the methods that suit you and your class best.