Tips & Tools for Creating Effective Media
Discover strategies and gain insight on Designing & Creating Media
Media provides the potential to create richer, more effective and active learning opportunities by enhancing learner outcomes both in and outside the classroom. Teaching & training with audio & video in particular is a great strategy if you’re looking to reinforce or supplement your classroom instruction, flip your class, move your training online or create engaging learning content for your hybrid, on-campus or Ecampus course. Learning by way of media content enhances face-to-face interaction while removing the time and pacing constraints of the physical classroom space. Media is also a powerful means to communicate research projects, highlight department initiatives, and/or engage the public through more meaningful and dynamic experiences.
Media, and more specifically audio & video, is poised to become a ubiquitous and dominant form of communication. It makes sense then that we embrace media and utilize its inherent qualities in higher education. Of all the educational technology tools used in the learning experience, audio & video are the most visible and afford the ability to design flexible, engaging and impactful instructional content. And because it's such a powerful communication tool, media requires we make strong pedagogical choices and design instruction appropriately to ensure the content supports our learning objectives. In practice, media increasingly serves as an important component of many flipped & hybrid courses where providing access to online lectures creates more active and engaging in-class experiences. In addition to the online lecture, explore the resources below to discover ways effective media can support teaching and learning.
Give students the opportunity to encounter course content multiple times through multiple modalities, using media as appropriate.
Visit the Designing and Teaching and Effective Remote/Blended Canvas Workshop Course for tips on Making and Sharing Videos.
Who are my learners and how can they best learn with media?
Will students need preparation or support material for the media to be successful?
Where does it make sense for me to use media?
What are the learning objectives & goals for using media?
What types of learning assessments & reflections might I align with my instructional media?
What media and delivery type will best achieve my learning objectives?
When will I deliver the media? How will students access it?
Many instructors create video lectures or include existing videos to model new skills and to expose students to new content. But how do you know that your students are engaged? Check out the OSU Ecampus blog to learn about how in-video quizzing can make video watching an active learning experience.
In this two-part OSU Ecampus blog series on video selection and use in online courses, Craig Rademacher provides the reasoning behind understanding course videos selection by course developers as a curatorial process, and explores video curation in practice in course development and provides a course design perspective on video presentation and management issues.
Once you have identified your learning objectives and goals, you'll want to identify the scope of your media content. Defining scope helps to ensure you're delivering relevant and connected content that best supports student learning.
Instructional media is a largely passive processing experience, and over time you may lose the attention of your viewers/listeners. Rather than creating an entire lecture, chunk the content into smaller segments that focus on individual learning objectives.
While creating engaging media may seem intuitive, it frequently requires more time and work than originally planned. With the removal of space, timing and visual/auditory queues afforded by an in-person lecture, media can highlight a lack of a connection and affirmed understanding. Think through your content and choose media that are relevant and not extraneous to the instructional material. Dialogue and storytelling are a key element to communicating your learning content. Stories help listeners relate to a recognizable structure and can increase engagement & understanding.
Introducing yourself and the learning outcomes at the outset of a media element can help students understand your expectations and provides a 'tour guide' feeling of togetherness. Short summaries throughout the media and a wrap up at the end ties the learning together and highlights main concepts & learning outcomes.
Now that you've considered strategies to design effective instructional media, it's time to create content. This process may require several iterations of practicing and recording before you have produced an effective media element.
Storyboarding can provide you a visual & textual template that will help guide you through the content creation process. This helps to keep you on track and ensures you cover the learning objectives determined in the Design process. It also functions as supplemental text to accompany the media element and will be the basis for captions if needed.
A key component to any effective media element is the style in which it is created. Nobody likes the way they look or sound on camera. And while creating or recording media can feel a little uneasy, with a little practice you'll come to develop a personal approach that works for you.
Delivering media asks us to consider how our audience accesses and makes meaning of the learning content we create. As such, we must take care to ensure instructional media is usable for learning across the widest range of individual variability, regardless of format or features.
Have you ever shot a video with your phone or hosted a virtual meeting and wondered if there was anything you could do to make it look better? Or perhaps even more importantly – have you ever felt intimidated to start?
Greg Aronoff from OSU's Professional and Continuing Education (PACE) shares insights in an essential guide on video. Visit the links below to learn more.
This guide provides useful sites to help make you and your students multimedia pros!
Checkout our collection of short how-to videos and help articles to learn about Using Media and Teaching with Zoom.
How to Share Media in Canvas Kaltura is fully integrated into Canvas. Media that a user has previously uploaded through MediaSpace is available through "My Media" in Canvas and, conversely, any media that a user uploads through Canvas will be available to them in "My Media" in MediaSpace.
How to Add Captions to a Video in Kaltura Learn about adding captions to your video using Automated Speech Recognition. This service is free.
How to Edit Captions in Kaltura. Kaltura gives you the ability to update/edit captions for a video that already has captions associated with it, or delete those captions entirely.
How to Edit a Video in Kaltura Learn more about the Kaltura online Video Editor and how to trim your videos.
Create or Edit an Interactive Video Quiz Video Quizzing enriches student engagement and is a great teaching tool for assessing student comprehension with low-stakes quizzes.
Download you media from Kaltura. This article shows the steps to download your own media files from MediaSpace or Canvas.
Find out how to prepare video and deliver it to your students using the tools provided by Oregon State: Zoom, Kaltura, and Canvas.
13 essential tips for shooting better video with your iPhone. Produced by Greg Aronoff from OSU's Professional and Continuing Education (PACE).
The Media Hub Lightboard. Learn about the Lightboard and some basic tips for it's use.
OSU has enhanced technology in more than 300 classrooms to support interactive remote and blended learning. Take a look at our brief videos and step-by-step instructions on Zoom and the classroom tech.
Explore tips and tricks for leveraging Zoom for synchronous course meetings, small group discussions, and remote office hours on the Teaching and Learning with Zoom site. Make sure to check out Oregon State’s collection of quick help videos on Zoom, as well as the Zoom security settings needed to prevent malicious participants from accessing your Zoom sessions.
Learn more about support and training resources, including personalized Canvas or media consultations, recorded teaching strategies webinars, and the TechKTA program that offers trained assistants to help you manage your synchronous Zoom sessions.
Flex Kits are being distributed and designated for specific classrooms where remote and blended instruction is scheduled. To learn about using a Flex Kit in your scheduled classroom, please check with your College IT Support group.