Audio/Video in Education Content

Robert Scoble has been talk­ing about video blog­ging, and it’s got me think­ing.

As to visu­als Jon argues: “If I don’t have any visu­als, then I should stick to audio.â€� Ahh, now I’m start­ing to get his point. He’s say­ing if you don’t have any­thing visual you should just stick with audio. Well, that’s true. But, what is “visu­als.â€� Every­thing around me has a visual component.

I’ve been using audio and video in my teach­ing mate­r­ial for the last year. It’s changed the way my stu­dents inter­act with me (for the bet­ter, I hope) and I like to think we’re going to be get­ting bet­ter at deliv­er­ing it insti­tu­tion­ally.

But I had lunch today with two of the brains of the place, Bill Berry and George Love (George says he has a blog he needs to revise, Bill should be blog­ging, and he knows it — I hope he’s suf­fi­ciently shamed at his absence from the dis­cus­sion). Our dis­cus­sion wan­dered into the realm of stan­dard­iz­ing media con­tent into the class­room. So, before I get into the meat of my point, I have to give a lit­tle back­ground.

To date, we’ve been mov­ing down the road of stan­dard­iz­ing con­tent across classes. When you attend a class, you’ll get the con­tent as con­structed by the deans and aca­d­e­mic devel­op­ment com­mit­tees, assign­ments, etc. You’ll down­load a syl­labus that’s been tweaked by a fac­ulty mem­ber, but it’s far from a cus­tom job. You’ll get access to elec­tron­ics course mate­ri­als and e-texts.

That’s our M.O., and a require­ment of an insti­tu­tion of our size and expanse, in order to make a more or less seam­less tran­si­tion between cam­puses and modal­i­ties for our stu­dents. If I’m a stu­dent in Boise and I want to move to Mary­land, I’d bet­ter be able to pick up my course­work lock-step when I land in order to fin­ish my degree in the most effi­cient man­ner pos­si­ble. Dif­fer­ent loca­tions, on-ground ver­sus online, dif­fer­ent instruc­tors — we have to be able to account for those fac­tors in courses. That part is com­mon sense for us these days (though it’s mak­ing me think of some other things that aren’t so com­mon sense as I write this… hmm).

But fac­ulty have a point, too. We want to have a more inti­mate con­nec­tion intel­lec­tu­ally with our stu­dents. We want to get to know them, and want them to get to know us through the pre­sen­ta­tion of our course con­tent. This doesn’t jive well with the stan­dards approach, and you end up with fac­ulty doing far more to build their own courses in the field than the course design­ers ever intended, and indeed than serves the grow­ing pop­u­la­tion of stu­dents who move between cam­puses and modal­i­ties.

OK, so we have this “new stu­dent”. We don’t really know what that means. We say it’s the Echo Boomer, Gen Y… I’m feel­ing more and more that the new stu­dent for us is more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of our cur­rent stu­dent with greater expec­ta­tions of us. Yeah, we’re touch­ing the post-high school crowd with greater intent, but we don’t have very many of them yet to know what they want — we can only make assump­tions.

So this new stu­dent, they want to con­nect with course mate­r­ial in a way con­ve­nient to them. Since I’m the blog and pod­cast guy, I tend to go straight there in these dis­cus­sions, and in fact, I’ve been using them (pod­casts) in my classes as a skunkworks for the past year. Here’s what I’ve found, and what I brought to the atten­tion of George and Bill today.

1. We have a ten­dency to focus on video because it looks cool and makes us appear more advanced than we are right now.
   
2. We have a ten­dency to focus on the tech­nol­ogy at the expense of the stu­dent experience.
   

On the first point, it comes out in tech­ni­color when you look at the “pro­duced” pieces with long stints of talk­ing heads, mul­ti­ple cam­era angles, and 3-D ren­dered stu­dio envi­ron­ments. But does this visual expe­ri­ence add any­thing to the stu­dent expe­ri­ence? Does it add any­thing to off­set the sac­ri­fices you have to endure to deliver it?

My expe­ri­ence over the last year tells me that intro­duc­ing pod­casts in class dri­ves a few key fac­tors. First, the pod­casts are me. This impacts a social con­nec­tion between me and my stu­dents and, par­tic­u­larly in the online weeks, this con­nec­tion dri­ves stu­dents to pay greater atten­tion, to lis­ten to the mate­r­ial more than once, and to regur­gi­tate it in their course­work with greater reg­u­lar­ity and sophis­ti­ca­tion. I find that most of the course mate­r­ial I pro­duce can be deliv­ered in audio, sup­ple­mented occa­sion­ally with a still slide of a graph or two, and that stu­dents appre­ci­ate that.

The lis­ten where lis­ten­ing is appro­pri­ate. The watch where watch­ing is appro­pri­ate.

And where is watch­ing appro­pri­ate? Any­where the listener’s cre­ated vision of the mes­sage in their mind’s eye serves to dimin­ish or dis­tract from the mes­sage. And you don’t need a talk­ing head for that.

But that’s really not the biggest issue. The biggest issue is a cul­tural one only periph­er­ally sup­ported by tech­nol­ogy. See, we’re going at this the wrong way (I’m telling George and Bill). We’re try­ing to pro­vide pod­casts and vod­casts for every course that are stan­dard­ized with our best speak­ers in that field, for every instruc­tor to use. If we were smart about this, we’d cre­ate the tools for every fac­ulty mem­ber to cre­ate their own pod­cast mate­r­ial and let them sup­port their courses them­selves.

Of course, 8% of our stu­dents are still on dial-up. That puts us in the rather Microsoft­ian posi­tion of need­ing to main­tain back­ward com­pat­i­bil­ity of all our resources for this minor­ity. Minor­ity: you know who you are. Please, join us in the infor­ma­tion age. Put your high-speed bill on the level of a util­ity. You won’t regret it.

So, that’s the lat­est flag I’m car­ry­ing. I’m not sure who owns the process, but after I met with George and Bill, I headed over to our pub­lish­ing divi­sion and met with Beth Aguiar, another stun­ningly smart per­son in this field. We talked about the con­cept of hav­ing a con­tent library of cur­rent (like current-week-recent) media clips fac­ulty could choose from for their course prepa­ra­tion. Imag­ine a licensed YouTube for inter­nal use only that’s per­fectly indexed and ready for plu­gin to illus­trate con­cepts. If I’m talk­ing about “Prod­uct Place­ment”, I just search for it and find the 20 sec­ond clip of the Ford Hybrid on “Alias” and record an intro and outro as icing on the cake. Dreams, but Beth’s com­ments stuck with me and leads me to the fol­low­ing con­clu­sion: our fac­ulty are ter­ri­fied of that stuff. We need to do a bet­ter job of train­ing and show­ing that this is a tool more than spit and pol­ish. It’s not about who’s cool, it’s about the ser­vice to the stu­dents. Of course, if the stu­dents are well-served, that’s pretty cool in itself.