Studio in a Box: Instructor guide to recording lectures

Section 1: Pedagogical Principles and Guidelines for Lecture Video Recordings

Why do recorded online lectures?

Recording a lecture video will give your students the option to review the session at their own pace while helping to mitigate technology challenges and conflicting schedules.

While developing asynchronous video can be time intensive, there are advantages to using asynchronous content such as:

• Sustainability. After you create a video or textual content you can reuse it for future course offerings and across multiple courses.
• Flexibility. Students can access asynchronous content anywhere and anytime. This gives them more flexibility in how they access and interact with content. UBC students have indicated they value this flexibility (McPhee & Lyon, 2020 [pdf]).
• Internet and bandwidth. Students have fewer constraints from limited internet connections and bandwidth when accessing asynchronous content.
• Students can playback or re-read. Students can replay and pause video lecture content or re-read textual content.

Section 2: Video Recording Lectures – Synchronous Contexts

One approach to developing asynchronous content is recording your synchronous sessions. Zoom allows for the session to be recorded. Once you have recorded the session, you can share the video with your students on Canvas. If you choose to record your synchronous sessions, be sure to let students know in advance.

It is easy to quickly record and share synchronous lectures. This allows students who were unable to attend to view the lecture and learn from the questions other students asked. It also allows students to review the lecture as many times as necessary to feel confident with the material.

Limitations

Certain elements of the session may not be captured properly, such as the breakout rooms. The following strategies can help make your recorded lectures more effective and engaging:

• Use an external microphone when you lead your synchronous online lectures. Higher audio quality is important for reusing and replaying.
• Download and edit the recording. With editing, you can add annotations and cut out areas that are not useful for replay, such as technical issues.
• Consider ways that the recording can be incorporated with other content, such as embedding reflective or quiz questions, or linking the video to course readings or discussions.

Section 3: Video Recording Lectures – Asynchronous Contexts

In addition to recording your synchronous online lectures, you can develop videos to replace in-person lecture components and help engage your students. These could include: lecture videos, demonstration videos, virtual field visits/trips, guest speakers, or interviews.

Effective practices for pre-recorded course videos

If you are considering using pre-recorded course videos, there are a few easy things you can do to make them more conducive to learning:

• Consider creating different types of videos to establish a teaching presence in your online course (e.g. Welcome video, Course orientation, video feedback).
• Use short chunks. Studies show that a shorter video is the key to engaging students, with approximately 6 minutes as the optimum length. While there is not definitive research showing increased learning from shorter videos, if the students don't watch the video, they can't learn from it. Note: recording short video clips can be time consuming with segmented learning.
• Emphasize important concepts. Emphasize essential material by highlighting, using pointers, zooming in, and drawing circles, to focus learners’ attention on important points.
• Design for accessibility. When possible create video transcripts to make your videos accessible for all learners.
• Design for sustainability. You should also try to design your video so it can be reused in other courses or in the same course in the future. Videos can be time-consuming to create, so make sure you can use the same videos from term to term without having to redo them. Avoid including dates and references to current events that will limit the potential of reusing content from year to year.
• Don’t overdo it on production. Post-processing can be extremely time-consuming and there is no evidence that it leads to better learning from videos (if anything, slick videos can deceive people into thinking they have learned something when the opposite is the case).

Section 4: Practical Tips and Best Practices

What space or tools are available?

At UBC, you have access to learning spaces to record/livestream your lecture on campus as well as different tools to help you record your lectures such as Zoom, Camtasia, and Kaltura. In addition, there are do-it-yourself (DIY) on-campus studios which allow you to quickly create and share lectures or content videos. The One-Button and the Lightboard studios at UBC Vancouver are open for faculty preparing content for credit courses for both summer and winter academic terms.

Let's Get Started!

Now that you have a better understanding of what a pre-recorded video entails and the tools available at UBC, you are ready to start! We suggest four steps in the process: