As you've no doubt heard over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are a lot of tips and tricks for instructional videos. Even beyond the pandemic teaching environment, videos are a great tool to help make the most of class time and to flip classes (a topic we'll particularly address in Module 4).
So what's the best way to structure videos? Should you show just slides with a voiceover? A video of yourself speaking? Some of both?
Well, in short, it depends. We've chosen to mix and match a bit for these videos, so you can see the different pros and cons of the different types of videos. We've also compiled a few different sources with advice and opinions about video best practices below, so you can look into this more deeply, if you so choose.
Our personal thoughts are that a lot of this will vary depending on the class and what you're using the videos for:
Amy: I usually include video of me gesturing wildly while I'm giving mini-lectures, in large part because I think it helps my students feel like they're getting more of an actual connection to me, in all my wildly gesticulating ways, despite the asynchronous nature of a video lecture. I want to make my videos something that conveys a lot of my own personality. That said, for something like a video that's going over Greek vocabulary, it's often just a screen capture of me drawing on a tablet screen, with my voiceover and no video of me.
Ellen: I'll include video featuring myself speaking if I'm trying to engage students more deeply or personally. So, if I'm talking about my own research or presenting an argument I want to persuade students of, I stay on screen (and try to avoid presenting many slides with text). But if I'm making a video that's based on presentation of facts, especially if the slides involves a lot of text or in-depth charts, I stay off camera and just provide a voiceover, so that I don't distract students from the material on the slides. But, in both of these contexts, students usually saw my face during Zoom classes; if the class were entirely asynchronous, I'd probably err on the side of including videos of myself speaking, so that students knew they were engaging with a person.
n.b. Some very important video guidelines that don't depend on the situation include best practices for accessibility. Zoom and PowerPoint can generate a pretty good transcript for closed-captioning these days (though you'll definitely want to check on any words in foreign languages and any unusual names or places!), and there are a lot of great accessible video resources out there to help you think about all the things that can make your videos most accessible!
Inman, J., & Myers, S. (2018). Now Streaming: Strategies That Improve Video Lectures. IDEA Paper #68. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED588350.pdf *This resource is a good summary of scholarship and is particularly recommended!*
"Another common question that instructors ask when creating their first video lecture is “Do I have to record my face?” Although some research indicates that students prefer video lectures that include their teachers’ faces..., there is no empirical evidence that it directly impacts their learning. However, depending on the content of the video, an instructor’s face may be more or less important. In video lectures that contain high emotional content or require minimal visual aids, the presence of the instructor may enhance the presentation. In a video lecture with complex charts, graphs, or elaborate visual components, an instructor’s face could be a distraction. Because research in this area is still emerging, college instructors may also want to take into consideration the course format when making this decision. There may be no need for the instructor to appear in a video lecture that accompanies a flipped classroom, because the students will have the opportunity to interact with the instructor in class. However, there may be a benefit to including the instructor’s face in a video made for an asynchronous online course in which students may not see their instructor otherwise such as promoting instructor social presence, which has been linked to increased retention, motivation, and learning in online courses..."
René F. Kizilcec, Kathryn Papadopoulos, and Lalida Sritanyaratana. 2014. "Showing face in video instruction: effects on information retention, visual attention, and affect." In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2095–2102. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557207
"Participants strongly preferred instruction with the face and perceived it as more educational . . . Consistent with prior work, no significant difference in short- and medium-term recall ability was found. Including the face in video instruction is encouraged based on learners' positive affective response."
Kurzweil, D., Marcellas, K., Henry, B. et al. Evidence-Based Guidelines for Recording Slide-Based Lectures. Med.Sci.Educ. 30, 1611–1616 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40670-020-01032-w
"Pre-recorded lectures can be an efficient way to convey instructional content to students in distributed environments, but videos that are not of high quality can potentially reduce student engagement."
"Previous work has shown that the use of a faculty video is rarely distracting (in one study, only 10% of the students found it distracting) and typically increases learner engagement. It does not, however, appear to improve retention. Thus, faculty should determine which approach they will take based on their available resources and carefully consider other means to increase engagement if a video feed of the faculty is not utilized."