Workplace vets in the classroom Post #2
Workplace emigrants are dynamite in the classroom when they embrace video tools to reach students
(If you’re just joining the conversation, I’m a veteran journalist who recently finished six years of teaching at Stony Brook University. This series of posts aims to boost the next crop of working-professionals-turned-teachers over the most common stumbling block: classroom technologies.)
The question isn’t If you will use video in your teaching.
Your question, as a workplace veteran embarking on a teaching career: is How you Will use video to reach students who learn everything important to them via video.
Don’t expect me to humor video resistors and skeptics.
Your students spend more time on YouTube™ (averaging 40 minutes per session on mobile devices) than they do on any cable channel. They prefer the DIY aesthetic to legacy TV’s blow-dried artificiality. They Facetime™ and Skype™ via cellphones and they use YouTube search the way you use Google™ search: to learn about everything from what to buy to how things work.
If you want to reach millennials, video is a mission-critical tool.
Fortunately, it is not as hard as you might think.
As an instructor, you’ll have access to two easy types of video tools: automatic and informal. (In next week’s post, I’ll encourage you to experiment with slightly more formal videos.)
AUTOMATIC CLASSROOM RECORDING
The first video system you’re likely to encounter as a new college instructor is an automatic capture system that, with your permission, records your class with a fixed camera aimed at the podium. Audio is picked up from the room’s sound system. Better systems also record, in-sync, your PowerPoint-type slideshow.
Minutes after class, the whole package is stitched together and available for students through a campus web service. Here’s what the videos look like, uncut. (Fast-forward through the safety tape to find the start.)
The system at Stony Brook University was resisted by some cranks on the tenured faculty who told me Echo 360 was part of a cost-saving plan to replace human lecturers with videos.
I used the auto-recorder from my first lecture because, as an undergraduate TA in Prof. Pam Stepp’s excellent public speaking course, video was the essential tool for rehearsal and self-assessment.
Watching myself on the Stony Brook recordings, I could check my delivery and timing and note if I was walking around enough. (More on that in a later post.) I discovered I repetitively start a new idea with a long “Sooo…” and that I share Hillary Clinton’s habit of using an unpleasant shouty voice instead of trusting the microphone.
Catching those tendencies before they harden into annoying habits is reason enough to use the auto-record system. But wait…there’s more.
The real reason to use it is the student traffic to class recordings.
I’ll admit I hesitated to flip the final switch making recordings available, but when I did, great things happened.
About 10% of my lecture-session students watched every week.
Don’t mis-read that number. Most students attend class and don’t need a replay.
But the ones who use it really need it.
I asked around and even did a simple survey and learned two important groups found the videos especially useful: Non-native-English speakers and students working their way through school or too ill to make it to class.
The biggest group of users were international students and first-generation immigrants for whom English is a second language. They reported the videos helped them look up unfamiliar words and then re-hear them in context.
There are also, I learned, times when I speak too quickly for them. The online player allowed them to skim forward and back to find the needed sections and even to slow me down when replaying. That’s a fantastic accommodation of students’ needs.
An anecdote illustrates the value to the other group: working students. One of my students, a bank teller working full-time while at school, told me at the end of a snowy semester that the videos saved her from driving almost three hours round-trip to attend my 80-minute lecture, her only class that day. If lecture video can help that student earn her degree, it has more than paid for itself.
If your campus offers a taping system, sign up for it. It’s the work of maybe 5 minutes to check them each week for audio quality and adjust settings for clarity.
Stony Brook’s system fed the videos straight into the class web pages through the Blackboard ™ Learning Management System, so that part of the process was no burden on me at all, making the videos easy for students to find.
One final bonus: Severe weather like Superstorm Sandy disrupted class almost every year while I was at Stony Brook. You’ll learn that when a campus closure coincides with a lecture day, it’s a major problem, forcing you to either jam two big information days into one or even to cut a whole day’s material.
But…if you are the little pig who builds with brick, you have a back-list of recordings. When a previous semester’s lecture covers the appropriate material, there’s no need to tear up your syllabus. Just send your students the link, build an online discussion around it so that students can ask questions, and proceed on-schedule while your unrecorded colleagues are juggling and struggling in their houses of straw. To students, your class will be the model of serenity in the storm.
INFORMAL VIDEO: Official and Unofficial
Official video tools: the video post on your class page
Most Learning Management Systems now include a simple interface that permits you to use a web-cam or phone camera to record a short video that is then posted on the class web page.
I strongly encourage you to swallow your pride, embrace your inner ham and make recordings of yourself for students.
If you’re not a natural early adopter or even late-adopter of video technology, it’s actually an advantage, in my opinion.
Students are in a constant state of struggle, learning new skills while engaging with new material and at the same time doing a lot of growing up. Your willingness to experiment and fail and try again sets a good example and makes you human instead of the vain Sage on the Stage with nary a hair out of place.
These self-recorded videos are funky-looking and low-quality, which is, I believe, why students respond warmly, taking time in their semester appraisals to thank professors who use video. After all, they Hoover™ up self-shot video feeds on YouTube every day and few have high production values.
Here is one example of a weekly video I posted responding to student comments about lecture. Two important elements of this video: it’s not email (which Millennials don’t seem to read) and it makes your classroom more “loopular,” a concept I picked up from a course with Chis LaVictoire Mahai in the 1990s. I’ll spend more time on loopularity in a future post, but it’s the simple notion that when an audience sees you using their feedback to make your work more useful to them, they invest more deeply in your work. That’s what you want: a conversation that continues outside the classroom.
Unofficial Video Tools: Short cellphone video clips
If you’re like me, you’ll see elements of your class in the world as you go about your life. When that happens, whip out your cellphone and briefly record what you are seeing, whether you are a sculptor watching tourists fondle the bull statue in Bowling Green Park or a field entomologist who happens on shallow water nets spun by Hydropsyche pellucidula.
You can narrate or not, as you choose, but your quick cellphone video can easily be embedded in a PowerPoint-type slideshow or posted on your class webpage. Again, the example of alertness you set is as important as the quality of the video. Students are eager to find connections between the classroom and their lives and your shaky video demonstrates what it means to bring classroom ideas to bear on the world outside the classroom.
Every so often, take a break from posting email or online text messages to students about schedule or other changes. Use your phone camera to record a message in a non-office, non-classroom setting. A little visual variety will be welcome.
Unofficial Live Video practice #1: Skype visitors
Because of your long experience in your chosen field, you know people. People with great stories to tell, or with a unique perspective on the problems of your profession.
Bring them to class, via Skype. This works best in small seminar classrooms, as the principal value derives from one-on-one interactions, which aren’t felicitous in a big lecture hall.
My colleagues Paul Schreiber and Timothy Hughes at Stony Brook did this constantly in upper-level reporting and ethics courses, carving out 15 or 20 minutes for a virtual visit to professionals in their workplace sometimes thousands of miles away.
The occasional jerky-video or lost signal glitches were more than outweighed by the students’ ability to ask questions of someone out there in the working world, usually from their workplace. Versimilitude is powerful stuff and Skype delivers that, in spades.
And don’t kid yourself. Even your face gets old to students, so a fresh face wakes them up. It’s best if both students and guest are given a little outline of the particular expertise of the guest in advance.
If you can, try to link your laptop through a projector so that the image is big, but this practice works well enough even with 12 students at a table with a laptop.
It’s such a good idea that my hero, Prof. Lyn Millner, got grant funding to build an ongoing series any journalism classroom could tap into. Called “Face to Face” Millner’s approach could be copied for classrooms in any professional field.
Unofficial Live Video Practice #2: Livestreaming
Once you’ve shot some short video artifacts and figured out how to use them on the class webpage or in lectures, look for opportunities to use Periscope™ or Facebook Live™.
These apps permit you to broadcast video live from your cellphone anywhere you have a signal. Because they stream from your social media account (Twitter and Facebook, respectively) your followers are alerted you have gone live and they can interact with you while you are live, asking questions and requesting different camera angles.
This is a way workplace veterans can really shine.
Your working life and your contacts land you in interesting places that can illuminate important issues or ideas from your course. If you’re clear to broadcast whether it’s from a construction site, the control room of a broadcast studio or the kitchen of a major hotel, do it.
It’s best if you alert students well ahead of time of the day and time of your live broadcast. But if a sudden opportunity pops up, take advantage of it.
Again, between the app itself, which is intuitive and easy-to-use, and your campus’ Teaching & Learning staff, you’ll find plenty of guidance and lists of best practices to get you started. Here is a good blog item on ways professors can use livestreaming apps. In switching phones, I lost my Periscope account or I would show examples of my livestreams for your amusement.
The next post will focus on the use of slightly-more-formal video productions to supplement readings and generate class conversations.
Dean Miller is a veteran journalist who served as Director of the Center for News Literacy from 2009–2015. He chastely changed from a suit to a tux in his car — on camera — for a classroom video series on bedrock journalism skills.
