Pedagogical Practices for Lecture Videos

Lecture Slides and Pedagogy
Lecture Videos and Pedagogy

So, you’ve decided to create asynchronous lecture content? That’s excellent! Now, you’re here wondering how to make sure that you’re creating materials that your students will watch and even learn from. While there may not be any one-size-fits-all solution or formula for successful learning, we can offer some tips that will help ensure you keep pedagogy in mind throughout the process.

First, there are so many components than integrate in order to create engaging and meaningful lecture materials and sometimes it’s tough to know exactly where to start. The first thing to consider should be a lesson plan. More information about lesson planning can be found on our lesson planning resource site. From there, though, there are still various components to consider: slide presentations, process demonstrations (e.g., software demonstrations, hand calculations), audio (both script and sound effects), and video (both screen sharing and webcam). Now, you might not be including all of these components. But, it’s worth going over each of them.

Most of the time, you can start by making sure that your presentation is aesthetically pleasing. There are intuitive expectations that people have when watching media such that, when these “rules” are broken, something feels “off”. More about media aesthetics can be found on our Best Practices for Creating Quality Educational Videos page. Many of the tips from that site (e.g., choose an external microphone) can be backed by both Media Production literature and pedagogical literature. For example, choosing an external microphone is a media production tip to increase the quality of your voice. Incidentally, this increases the signal (that’s you) and decreases the noise (that’s your dishwasher or computer fan, for example). Increasing the signal while decreasing the noise helps to reduce students’ cognitive load. The less they have to do to pay attention to your message, the more mental resources they will have available to learn from it. In short, our Top 5 Tips for creating quality educational videos can be applied to pedagogical tips as well:

Ensure quality internet connection
Ensure quality audio
Be mindful of screen content sizing
Consider whether it’s appropriate to have your webcam included
If you’re including webcam footage, be mindful of framing and lighting

However, there are a few more tips to offer from a pedagogical front for two main aspects of creating engaging lecture videos: (1) creating slide decks and (2) recording videos.

Lecture Slides and Pedagogy

There seems to be a fine line between engaging lecture slides and distracting ones. That line is so fine that we might consider the category boundary between engaging and distracting a very large one. In fact, while some students might find certain components of a slide deck engaging, others might find those same components distracting. It goes back to the argument that Universal Design for Learning theory posits that there is no one-size-fits all solution for teaching and learning. Still, there are a few common themes that might help increase how visually appealing your slides are while simultaneously avoiding distracting your audience.

Parallel Construction

When your students can predict where the information will appear on the slide, it reduces the amount of time they spend searching for what they need to pay attention to. Even though this might only me milliseconds, it’s still important in terms of reducing cognitive load.

The Tip

Create a predictable arrangement of information. For example, keep all the images to the right, text to the right, and the title at the top!

Animations

Spinning text and swivel icons might be fun. But, they also tend to distract your students. When your students are busy looking at your fun and exciting animations, they aren’t attending to your central points.

The Tip

Use animations sparingly; that is, choose to annotate your slides while recording using Kaltura’s Annotation Tool over distracting animations.

Bullet Point Information

When there is a lot of text on the screen, one of two things can happen. Either students will become overwhelmed and they will stop attending to the message or they will attempt to read what’s on the slides whilst ignoring what your are saying. So, if you’re using bullet points, you’ve given your students an advantage already! However, if you’re presenting all the bullet points at the same time, your students might be trying to read ahead in lieu of listening to you expand upon one point at a time.

The Tip

One great use of animations is to present one bullet point at a time.

Highlight Information

Even when you’re only presenting one bullet point at a time, the sentence that you’re presenting might have many components that could trip up your students. This is especially true with jargon-heavy information.

The Tip

Highlight what you want your students to attend to. This can be done using bolded font, a different colour of font or actual highlighted font. Remember to keep accessibility in mind, though!

Necessary Information

As humans, we have a tendency to dislike blank, or unfilled, spaces on slides. However, there is a difference between meaningfully filling space and adding to students’ cognitive load by including unnecessary information such as inappropriate images. When irrelevant images are included in presentations, your students will spend time looking at the images because we prefer informations over text. Then, they’ll be wondering how to connect the image to what you’re saying. Remember – this is all happening while you’re trying to teach!

The Tip

Try to only include necessary information. Rid your slides of all superfluous information like images.

Lecture Videos and Pedagogy

Just like your lecture slides, certain aspects of lecture videos can be more cognitively demanding than others. The central theme, here, is to reduce the cognitive load necessary to learn from your lecture videos. Most of the tips stem from Richard Mayer’s 12 principles for multimedia learning. Still, there are a few overall tips to offer!

Chunking

One of the most efficient ways to create engaging lecture videos is to keep them short. People tend to have a hard time attending to longer videos. Several researchers have advocated for shorter lecture videos in light of learners’ relatively short attention span for new information (e.g., Cooper & Richards, 2017; Jeffries, 2010; Mayer et al., 1996). Research has also found that students are not only more satisfied with shorter segmented lecture videos, but they also benefit academically from them when compared to longer videos.

The Tip

Create a series of segmented lecture content rather than one long video. Alternatively, you can use Kaltura’s Timeline feature to create meaningful chapters for your students.

Interactivity

The literature on interactive lecture videos is currently sparse. However, research from electronic textbooks has demonstrated that students benefit academically from interactive material over static electronic print (Sommers et al., 2018).

The Tip

Create some interactive content (i.e., something to do) throughout your lecture videos. It doesn’t have to be incredibly intricate. Perhaps ask your students to answer a question or two before and/or after the videos.

Active Learning

In a face-to-face format, there are several instances and opportunities to be able to interact with your audience. Hence, there are a number of ways to, very naturally, involve your students in your lecture. In an online and asynchronous environment, however, we need to be a little more creative to create active learning opportunities.

The Tip

Structure your videos to create active learning opportunities by using guiding questions, integrating reflection points into your videos, inserting knowledge checks, and utilizing discussion forums. Don’t forget that you can ask your students to pause the video to complete tasks like posting to forums.

Now that you’ve considered both aesthetics and pedagogy, while creating your engaging lecture videos, please don’t forget to consider accessibility. Following Universal Design for Learning, we have created a few tips to help you ensure your materials are accessible for all learners! Please visit our Creating Accessible Lecture Videos page.

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