Twenty years ago, York University recorded Dalton Kehoe's lectures for its online students. Kehoe was the instructor new faculty were sent to watch when they wanted to learn how to teach. The recordings had a professional camera crew and a post-production studio behind them. His students called them the most boring thing they had ever watched.
The medium changed, and the teaching that worked in a room didn't carry over. In a room, the glazed look at the back of the class tells you to circle back and ask a question. On camera, nobody tells you anything.
William's view is that low engagement with async lectures isn't down to the content or students' attention spans. "We've grumped for 20 years that students today just don't have the attention spans they used to," he said. "That is utter nonsense." It's the delivery, and faculty already have the best part, which is the content. "All we need to do is learn 5% of the production and recording side."
The full recording is above. We covered three pillars: what an async lecture needs to do, how to make videos students want to watch, and how to turn great videos into a great class. The guide below takes that third pillar and turns it into steps you can work through this term.
What's in the guide
William's part of the session was about making a lecture worth watching at any length. Our guide picks up after that, with how to cut a recording up and what to put around it. Quality video drives engagement, and how you build them into the broader structure of your class drives learning. The guide walks through eight steps:
- Split long lectures into sections Long, unbroken recordings tend to lose people. Split at the natural breaks into pieces of about five minutes, each titled by what students will learn.
- Ask questions between the pieces. Students who answered a few questions between segments of an online lecture had half as much mind wandering and scored higher on the final test.
- Tell students exactly what to do next. In a classroom you tell them. Online, the course has to, and every unclear instruction turns into an email in your inbox.
- Give students something to keep. Turn your lectures into notes that sound like you, and post them beside the matching video.
- Make practice frequent and low stakes. Students need somewhere to get things wrong before it costs them, with feedback that explains why.
- Connect the dots between modules. Mix earlier material into homework, so the course doesn't teach students to forget last week.
- Get students talking to each other. Pick one or two activities, such as group projects, debates or peer review, and do them well.
- Check the data, then fix what isn't working. When one five-minute piece loses people, you fix that piece. With a 50-minute lecture, you'd be re-recording the lot.
Each step ends with a checklist. At the back there's a one-page rubric that scores your course from "getting started" to "strong" on all eight. Score each row, then spend next term on the rows still in the first column.
If you only have an afternoon, start with step 1. It's what makes steps 2 and 8 work.
Learn more
William runs Lecturer to Legend at Rowan Elder, a credential program for faculty who want to make online lectures students want to watch.
If you'd rather start from lectures you've already recorded, Blended turns them into lessons with captions and notes, adds knowledge checks and exams, and shows you which students actually watched.
