Animated, Authentic, Accessible, and Free: Using Video in Online Courses

Anne Marie AndersonMelanie MorrisRaritan Valley Community CollegeWhy use video?

• Personalize courses
• Online courses receive “live” instruction
• Flip & hybrid classroom
• Re-watch & review concepts
• Provide feedback on assignments
• Universal design for learning

Tools that they use:

• Screencast-o-matic: Never had a need to purchase the paid version ($15/year)
• Camtasia: Paid licensing per user (~$300 per license)
• Jing: Free version of Camtasia with less editing options
• GoAnimate: Create animated videos in a variety of scenarios, characters, voice sounds, music, and effects to explain complex concepts.

The only one of these that I hadn’t heard of was GoAnimate. They showed a sample video from that site and they indicated that it took “a few hours” to create. My concern is that to only do a few videos yields a high learning curve; and doing a large number of videos takes too much time to create the videos for class. It’s a cool tool, but for the overhead (time), I think (hope) that there are other sites that make this easier.In addition to creating your own videos, they recommend a variety of sites for finding pre-existing videos:

• Khan Academy
• YouTube
• TedEd

In addition to the instructors creating videos, students also create video for the class. One important point is that you don’t grade on the students “ability” to produce the videos. But they do have some video production requirements:

• Storyboard/script writing
• Applying knowledge
• Teaching the content
• Information literacy

The presenters recommend using YouTube to disseminate the videos – with that, it eliminates almost all technical barriers to watch the videos. Additionally YouTube accepts almost every video file format and since Google owns them, Google has voice-to-text technology. They use the voice-to-text to copy/paste into Word for a full transcript of the video. The issue with this is that if you don’t “own” the video, you can’t replace the incorrect transcription. I did find out (from Amy) that if you own a video, you can select an option that allows others to edit your transcription – that seems to be a setting that the presenters didn’t know about.The presenters did go into a demo using screenshots to walk us through how to edit an auto-transcript that is generated from YouTube. This is a process that I’m already familiar with, but it’s a great thing for people who aren’t. the presenter did indicate that doing a read through of a 15-minute video can take about 4 minutes. Overall, a very informative session. It seems like the audience got a lot out of it!