Sample Videos

When your students first arrive on your course home page, personally greet them with video! This short welcome video can be displayed through the first week of class.

Let your students get to know you so that they discover connections and start to feel at home in your class.

​A course tour is a great way to show students how to navigate your course. No two courses are alike, so a tour is helpful for both novice and experienced online learners. This is your chance to emphasize what's important and show students how to perform key functions. With Camtasia, you can add arrows, spotlights, and annotations to reinforce key points and illustrate procedures.

Stay connected to your students and remind them that you are a real person! Sharing a bit of your world pays big dividends: stronger sense of community, greater trust in the instructor, and increased motivation to invest time and effort in your course. Here's a video postcard recorded with a cell phone and posted as an announcement:

If you are hoping to repurpose those classroom PowerPoints for your online students, video can help. Slides are designed to be visual aids during a presentation, not a stand-in for the presentation, and students don't pay much attention to a deck of slides simply dumped into a class. Why not a record a screencast of your lecture? Students can see your slides and hear you discuss them, just like in a face-to-face classroom. Here is one of my first screencasts!

Build enthusiasm for the new assignment with a video introduction! These videos can also address common student questions so that you aren't answering them all week long from your Inbox.

This is a sample demonstrating how I use video to provide feedback on student writing, using a fake student to protect privacy. After years of text feedback, students love the use of video.

This idea combines the power of targeted feedback with the lure of extra credit! Notice how it teaches a single lesson and then provides an incentive for students to apply this lesson to their own work.

Use screencasting to walk your students through important processes. My students email me often to tell me how much they appreciate this visual explanation, especially when it comes to new technology.