Transforming Your Lectures into Online Videos
From: Faculty Focus April 17, 2020
When I was asked to create an online course 20 years ago, I simply transcribed my face-to-face lectures into 10–15 page Word documents that I posted in our LMS. Don’t ask me how my students managed to get through them.
I was making the mistake that is made with nearly all new technologies—looking at them through the lens of the old way of doing things. It usually takes many years of experience before people learn about the unique principles that govern the new technology and how to use it effectively. For online courses, this usually means creating videos to replace the traditional face-to-face lecture.
While this is an improvement over text, most faculty create an online video by just adding narration to the PowerPoint they use in their lectures. Once again, they are thinking in the old paradigm by reading pages of mind-numbing bullet points as if their students were illiterate. Visuals are not for projecting your detailed notes—they are for amplifying the message with images that provide an emotional emphasis and visual analogue to the concept. The imagery makes the abstract concepts easier to understand and remember.
