Tag: video

laptop opened on table showing a zoom call with many facial images appearing. With a cup right next to the laptop

Are we being “captured” by our content – an opinion piece

January 9, 2023 / Shaun Searle / 0 Comments

Where misconceptions remain, should we reframe our understanding to ensure we don’t fall into bad habits?

I had a very interesting conversation with a Learning Designer with regards to video content on Moodle. The impromptu office conversation is something I’ve treasured since we returned to Campus post-pandemic. One of the gems to come from this conversation was – what constitutes good online teaching and what relationship does that have to video content?

The office consensus, perhaps understandable given our teaching backgrounds, was that the context in which the video is used is vital. Whether used in a flipped learning manner to stimulate further in-person discussion or to progress learning beyond the glass ceiling of set learning outcomes.

Ale Armellini has promoted the message that context, rather than content is king. He has said this on various stages and I am fortunate enough to have been in the room where those discussions have taken place. For the unacquainted, he provides a brief outline here https://www.cla.co.uk/blog/higher-education/content-is-not-king. One idea is that the job of a university is to enable successful learning through quality teaching, but I wonder if sometimes ‘content capture’ falls into traps based on the phrase itself.

The use of the word ‘content’ is both understandable and important in its distinction from ‘lecture capture’, the process of merely recording on-campus taught sessions. The University’s Content Capture policy offers both a definition of the term and examples of the various forms it can take:

“For example, this could be a short recording (audio and slides), a written summary of the session or a clearly annotated copy of the presentation slides providing an overview of key points, threshold concepts, or discussing points that students find difficult to understand. Such summaries, which need only be a few minutes long, can be created quickly and easily using available technology” (University of Portsmouth Content Capture Policy for Staff 2022, 3.2 p.6)

While video tends to be the most popular medium, in terms of creation by academics and what is demanded by students, are we led to this by convenience and ease of access rather than what is the best for learning?

There is a danger that content capture can fall into the same trap that lecture capture falls into – the recording of an event. A means of cataloguing, or proving “teaching woz ere” at a particular place or time. The meaning of capture (hopefully ignoring the alternative meaning to take into one’s possession or control by force!) is below…

The question is what are we recording accurately here? Is it a glorified how-to video? Are there opportunities to use and apply the knowledge within for the student? I wonder if video content has good learning intentions but would this automatically translate to successful learning outcomes? There are a lot more moving parts involved. Just because a module has videos, it does not mean that it is a good example of an online learning resource.

VLEs at one period were rather like the Wild West. Modules would vary from town to town based on their sheriff – some hospitable to visitors, and some, a lawless landscape. A pandemic and the creation of a Blended and Connected delivery have helped improve the student experience online and has given them a much-needed consistent approach. The University quite rightly received plaudits with a CATE award. This rewarded the hard work and efforts of all involved but also recognised the drive to change the culture around online learning and content capture.

However, with the weekly format of Moodle modules, students expect staff to “deliver” videos about the relevant taught content on a regular basis. Do we lose the true meaning of content capture and fall into the trap of just capturing material week by week?

Rather atypical to an opinion blog piece, this is meant to pose more questions and stimulate conversation rather than drawing definitive conclusions (surely I can get another blog out of that!). The next time you wish to add a video to your VLE, perhaps it is also worth considering the given circumstances of learning around that material. Hopefully, then it will capture your students’ attention, meaning they will fully engage in not just the content, but the learning around it.

Credit Image: Photo by Compare Fibre on Unsplash

A pair of glasses sat upright in front of a monitor. The monitor has some coding on the screen, which is blurred.

Don’t Lose it, Reuse it! Uploading old videos to Panopto can breathe life into old material

March 8, 2021 / Shaun Searle / 0 Comments

Introduction

I normally start all of my blogs with an anecdote from my decade of teaching and this time I’m going to take you all the way back! Back to my early days when I was a headstrong newly qualified teacher that had aspirations to be inspirational, full of new and cutting edge ideas and naive to any of the politics around the job. The pressure to achieve results and improve particularly my classes’ writing levels meant I always spent a lot of time (far too much!) trying to think up new activities to address the issue. Being an English specialist and with aspirations to lead the subject, it became my own personal crusade. I felt if I could improve my classes’ fine motor skills, this, in turn, would hopefully improve the quality of writing produced. I used to have sleepless nights over why my tasks that had taken ages to prepare, were in tune with their interests and created with cool computer images were having no impact. I ran this past a more mature teacher who showed me quite a thick book from the mid-’70s / early ’80s that contained cutting activities. The book itself had seen a lot of action and initially, I was very dismissive, saying that kids nowadays would have little interest in something so dated. She asked me to try it for a week and lo and behold my class loved it! It had other benefits I hadn’t foreseen such as calming and improving behaviour, making them take pride and care in their work. The writing levels did improve but not for my innovations but from my repurposing of old material that had been successful previously and was still relevant to my current students.

I then probably broke numerous copyright laws and spent a couple of hours after school photocopying the whole book and actually learned quite a big lesson in respecting the input of others. This particular resource helped me throughout my career, in 3 different schools for years and when I started leading Early Years, the ideas behind the resources became a staple part in providing children with the building blocks to begin their writing journey on.

No need to reinvent the wheel

This probably seems a very convoluted way in which to start a blog post for a University but currently, I am working through moving old Ubicast videos over to Panopto. While this is a long-winded process (I have to download them and reupload them on an individual basis), watching some of the Learning and Teaching Conference videos from 4 years ago has made me realise that a lot of the pedagogic messages ring true today.

I won’t use the blog to explain how to upload videos to Panopto as it is all outlined on the relevant page of the Content Capture part of the Preparing for Teaching in a Blended Learning Context.

The process of uploading videos to Panopto is fairly straightforward and perhaps a key element of it is that on a video’s upload, it inherits all of the features of a newly created Panopto video. This includes Automatic Speech Recognition, which is essential for the video to adhere to modern accessibility standards. It is worth stating that it is dependent on the sound quality of the recording itself (particularly if it is an older video or one of a live event) and the captions will need to be reviewed, just as any should before the video is used publicly.

Also within Panopto, there is an ability to add clips from other Panopto videos and you could also take this one step further and splice multiple video clips together to make a whole new creation.

I have old videos, what’s the next step

We will be looking to automatically migrate videos from the University’s repository, Compass in advance of the next academic year, however, due to the scale of the operation (there are nearly 30,000 videos) and the complexity (not every video has a clear owner), it needs to be actioned after periods of activity such as the assessment period.

That does not mean you have to wait! If there is a video in the Compass repository that you feel would be immediately beneficial to your teaching, please contact eLearn@port.ac.uk with all of the relevant information as they have administrator access to both systems and would be able to assist with moving this content over. Equally, you may feel more comfortable talking to the faculty Online Course Developers local to you as their role is to assist with Moodle content and they may have some excellent advice regarding it.

Final Thoughts

Most importantly, really consider why you wish to use a video and what the learning intention is behind it. The TEL Training session Content Capture and Distance Learning will promote the idea of using shorter videos to efficiently get your message across and engage the viewer more. Just because it is possible to upload an old 4-hour conference video, does not necessarily mean that you should. However, what it can do is to provide a different focal point to affirm a concept or to address a misconception.

Credit Image: Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

Designers should always keep their users in mind

From compliance to culture

January 18, 2021 / Stephen Webb / 1 Comment

The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR) provides clear legal requirements for universities in terms of making learning accessible for all students. In turn, most universities have begun a journey towards compliance with PSBAR. This is a good thing, right? Well, not necessarily; at least, not by itself.

Alistair McNaught, a leading champion of accessibility and inclusion for the HE sector, argues that we need to move from an approach based on compliance to one of culture change, a culture in which we minimise barriers to learning and maximise the benefits of different learning technologies. As educators we need to ask: who is consuming our resources, what are their needs, and how can we most effectively meet those needs?

The need for us to shift from a compliance-based approach to one of developing a culture of accessibility maturity is clear when you compare a university virtual learning environment (VLE) with the other types of website covered by PSBAR.

A typical public sector body – a local council, for example – will often run a website that has content that rarely changes, is primarily text-based, and is under the control of a small team of web experts. A university VLE, on the other hand, typically has thousands of academics with a range of skill sets uploading a bewildering variety of content and pointing to third-party tools on a daily basis. A compliance-only approach for universities is thus extremely challenging. In the worst case, a compliance-only approach could lead to unintended consequences that are entirely counter-productive (and there are anecdotal accounts of this happening): an institution could choose to be “compliant” with PSBAR by dispensing with digital diversity and reverting to paper handouts. If they did this it wouldn’t matter if the handouts were poor-quality, smudged, third-generation photocopies – because the accessibility standards don’t apply to printouts. This “compliant” approach would be bad for all students but it would hugely disadvantage disabled students – which is, of course, the opposite of what PSBAR hopes to achieve.

McNaught visited UoP a few years ago when he worked for Jisc as their Accessibility Subject Matter Expert. He played the role of a “mystery shopper”, acting as a disabled student who was trying to access the University VLE, website, and other online systems. He is now an independent consultant and has recently posted some thought-provoking articles about accessibility maturity in an educational context. Throughout 2020 he worked with the charity AbilityNet to build on and update the old TechDis Accessibility Maturity Model. Together they have developed two versions of a maturity model: an institutional model and a course/module model. For anyone interested in issues of digital accessibility and inclusion, it is worth following McNaught’s upcoming series of blog posts.

At the close of 2020, McNaught also published a couple of related posts (part 1 and part 2) that provided an explicit example of how PSBAR can lead to unintended consequences. The example involves something with which UoP and many other universities have been grappling since we all increased the amount of video being produced: captioning.

At face value, the legislation requires us to provide 100% accurate captions for deaf people. A risk-averse institution that lacks the budget to create “compliant content” might remove videos from the VLE. This unintended consequence would have a negative impact on all students, including disabled students. McNaught argues that an approach rooted in accessibility maturity would take into account context, and would provide a roadmap for improving video accessibility.

For example, many courses provide most of their content as text. Alongside this, some tutors provide a video version of the content. If the video explanation provides no more information than a text alternative, then the video does not require captions. It’s only if a video introduces new information, not explicit in the text, that the issue of captioning arises. So that’s one lesson: depending upon the context, videos can be an alternative format.

Here is another example of where context is important, and where the guiding principle must be a pedagogic purpose. Imagine a video of a debate. The video might be used for different teaching purposes: to examine rhetorical devices, to study non-verbal communication, to illustrate legal arguments, to highlight technical recording considerations … there are many possible uses. And the best accessibility solution for each use case might well be different! Captioning might not be the best solution. Thus if you provide a caption and then tick the box marked “compliant video” you might nevertheless have created a barrier, not a solution, to learning needs.

Or consider a video of a long-winded, rambling, needlessly prolix interview: a summary consisting of a few bullet points might well be a better solution – for all students – than captions.

Context is important. As McNaught writes: “digital accessibility is about culture change … we need to steer a path between legalism and realism, a path that raises awareness without raising hackles and that encourages skills rather than excuses”. Steering that path won’t be easy – but the destination makes the effort worthwhile.

Credit image: Photo by fauxels from Pexels

Using animated videos to engage learners

February 10, 2020 / Becky Holman / 2 Comments

Sometimes we have a subject that we want to get across that can be tricky to make interesting. Giving students (or indeed anyone) some text, audio or PowerPoint slides can often mean that interest in the subject matter is quickly lost and information is not properly taken in. Studies have shown that students tend to find information in the form of videos far easier to absorb, and when this comes in the form of a snappy, animated video it instantly becomes dynamic and engaging.

As we know, hiring a videographer is an expensive and time consuming business, so I decided to look for a viable alternative. Previously, I have used a variety of online animation tools, that although they were easy to use and, most importantly, free, I felt that we could do better. I wanted to find a tool that was not only cost effective, but could easily create a professional looking video. I had a look in my mind already as to the type of animation tool I was looking for, I wanted these videos to look contemporary and fun so that we could apply the tool to a variety of subjects and engage viewers of different backgrounds, and levels of study. I didn’t want to disengage a viewer immediately by having a video look too ‘cartoony’. Eventually, I came across Vyond.

What is Vyond?

Vyond (previously known as GoAnimate) is a cloud based video platform that anyone can use to create visually engaging, animated videos. Vyond provides the user with thousands of pre-made templates and props royalty free-music and characters which you can use to create dynamic content that keeps your viewers attention.

How can using Vyond help me?

As I mentioned earlier, studies have shown that using a short, animated videos can increase students in higher education capability of understanding difficult subject matter, whilst staying engaged with the content provided. Vyond provides many different tools to assist you with making a fantastic looking video, whether it be purely for information or to get a particular subject matter across.

Resources – Use Vyond’s asset bank of thousands of pre-made props, templates and characters to enrich your video.
Animation – You can animate pretty much everything in Vyond, to the way a character looks, to how a slide exits the scene. It all comes down to your creativity!
Adding a voice – Upload an audio file that you have recorded to either add a voiceover or character dialogue. If you give a character a voice, you can also have the character lip sync to the track!
Music and sound effects – Vyond offers lots of royalty-free music and sound effects for you to use, but you can still upload your own if you wish.
Exporting and sharing – Once you’re ready to share your video, you can either download it and upload it somwhere (for instance YouTube), embed it or simply use the shareable link provided.

Tips for making a great video

Creating a video with Vyond is easy (honestly!), but you still need to put some thought into your project. Here are three tips to get you started…

Start off by creating a storyboard – You should already have a relatively good idea of what you want your video to look like and the message you need to get across. Start off by putting those ideas down on paper, either by brainstorming or making a storyboard.
Try and keep videos no longer than 5 minutes – Viewers are more likely to retain information when videos are short and concise. The perfect time has been shown to be no longer than 2 minutes, however if you need a bit longer then try not to go over 5 minutes! This can be tricky, but it’s also where step one comes in handy, so you can plan your video and make it more concise.
Take the time to record your narrative – Creating a colourful, animated video means that trying to provide dialogue via on screen text can be really distracting and overwhelming. Of course we need to include captions for accessibility, but try and take the time to record your script and then add text only at key points of the video.

Here’s one I made earlier!

I made the below video for our TEL advent calendar to showcase what Vyond can do, so take a look!

How can I try it out?

Anyone can sign up for a two week trial via Vyond’s website and try it out themselves. After that you will be required to purchase a license. You can find out more about the packages available on Vyond’s site.

Already using Vyond or something similar – let us know!

We would love to hear from you if you are already using Vyond or a similar tool to create animations. You can feedback to us in the comment box below.

Image credit: Photo created using character templates within Vyond’s asset bank – https://www.vyond.com/

Woman standing behind video camera smiling

Video in Higher Education

July 29, 2019 / Andy Taggart / 0 Comments

A recent visit to Oxford University for a conference on the use of video in Higher Education provided an excellent opportunity to pick up insights into how video is being used in universities across the country. In the words of conference organiser Dominik Lukes:

“Since the advent of YouTube, video has gained in significance as a medium of instruction. It has become an invaluable resource for informal learning and teaching, professional development, and formal instruction”

The morning session consisted of a series of ‘lightning’ presentations, each no more than around 7 minutes. This allowed for a good number of issues and ideas to be presented from a wide range of universities. In the afternoon we could choose from a variety of topics to discuss in small groups, such as student created videos as assessment, accessibility and inclusion, and how to tell a story.

Among the highlights from the day was a lightning talk covering lecture capture. The presenter (James Youdale, University of York) considered the difficult issue of whether lecture capture was changing how teaching takes place and how students engaged with the video lecture. The thorny issue of whether to have lecturers opt-in to have their lectures captured or an opt-out option with all lectures captured unless the lecturer chooses otherwise was also touched on. Among statistics James’ research had found was that 41% of students watch the whole of the captured lecture, 23% skip to what they regard as the important points and 96% watch on their own. This talk raised, without necessarily answering, a few interesting questions such as

Should lecture capture change pedagogical practice?
Do students need better guidance/help in note taking?
How can lectures be made less passive?

From the work done at York, it would seem students generally do value lecture capture and would like more of it.

Taking lecture capture one step further and actually replacing lectures with video was the theme of a presentation by Chris Evans from UCL. Two studies were carried out to gain insight into what students thought about such a bold move. In this case a 2 hour lecture was replaced with a 1 hour interactive video lecture (Xerte was used to provide the interactivity but H5P could also be used). Student feedback was very positive, and to help ensure engagement with the videos assessments were used every two weeks.

Certainly lecture capture and substituting videos for lectures allow students to learn at their own pace but not sure either are a real replacement for direct human interaction

In the late nineteenth century the Psychologist Ebbinghaus created his now well known forgetting curve illustrating how quickly information is forgotten. More modern studies tend to confirm that students quickly forget what they are told in lectures. However, they also show that going back over materials in short bursts can greatly help information retention, perhaps that is the context in which lecture capture can be viewed. In terms of replacing lectures with videos, personally I am not convinced entire courses over a sustained period of time could be delivered this way.

The afternoon discussions developed some of the themes from the morning, of particular interest were views on overcoming barriers to the greater use of video. These barriers seemed to fall into two broad areas – time and skills. Making a video can be time consuming when all production factors are taken into consideration, from writing the script, to editing the raw footage and, many lecturers may feel they have neither the time or the skills to devote to creating videos. In terms of time, what needs to be emphasised that once the video is made it’s there to be used over and over again and down the line can actually save time – students can revisit the videos which can leave time for discussions on critical analysis and evaluation without having to go back over content. For as long as a course module exists, then the video will continue to be a useful teaching and learning resource. In terms of editing, lecturers would not be expected to necessarily have the skills required, but that is where developers are key, and they can be called on the handle the technical side of things.

Overall, the key message I took away from the day is that the research presented indicated videos can be a very useful tool but it’s simply not being used enough – maybe the carrots need to be made more obvious and possibly a few sticks as well?

Image credits: Brett Sayles on Pixels.com

Women holding a hand-held video recorder

Types of content capture

May 24, 2019 / Stephen Webb / 0 Comments

In September 2018 the University established a working group in order to better understand what the future of content capture should look like here at Portsmouth. The group wanted to know what sorts of content should be captured, what types of media were important, and how students and staff would feel about having their contributions to different types of session recorded. Once the responses from the online consultation exercises and “town hall” meetings have been fully analysed, the results will be made available through a variety of channels (including this blog). Until then, however, I wanted to advertise the recording of a webinar – one of the Future Teacher 3.0 series of webinars – which took place about the same time we were launching our working group.

In this webinar Graham Gibbs, a National Teaching Fellow and Reader in Social Research Methods at the University of Huddersfield, looks at the use of various different types of video in a higher education setting. He identifies “21 in 12” – twenty-one examples of educational video which you can see in just twelve minutes.

As the accompanying blurb states, these videos vary in approach, pedagogy, and production value – but all of them contain some educational value, and many of the techniques could be replicated at Portsmouth using existing technologies. Graham wrote a guide for the HEA’s Innovative Pedagogies series, entitled “Video creation and reuse for learning in higher education”. The guide is well worth reading, but if you don’t have time just check out the Future Teacher webinar – it lasts only 12 minutes!

Jed Villejo
Credit Image: Photo by Jed Villejo on Unsplash

Two different cartoon classrooms, one where the lecturer is just talk in front of the room. The other were the students are actively involved.

Flipping the classroom

May 29, 2017 / Jerry Collingwood / 0 Comments

“The Flipped Classroom” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by AJC1

Over the last few years the convenience of creating a multimedia recording has improved to such an extent that it is now very feasible to enhance the interactivity of contact time with students by recording content that can be passively consumed by students and providing it to them in advance of the valuable timetabled contact time. It requires an initial investment of time but with a bit of careful planning the recordings can be used for a number of years without the need for revision, potentially saving you time in the future as well as removing some of the stress of trying to squeeze all your teaching content into a finite number of lectures and also creates a resource for students to revise from and a reference you can use when providing feedback.

The concept is that you can pre-record content that would normally be presented as a lecture. This can be done without the audience of students which can be a stressful environment, with large lecture theatres, disruptive murmurings in the audience and audio-visual equipment not always performing as expected. This content can then be viewed by the student at their leisure, at a time when they are receptive to learning, fitting in around part-time employment and other commitments. Time that would normally be spent lecturing can then be repurposed as an engaging student-led session, affording the students time to ask any questions that may have arisen from consuming the content or by working through examples in class – important reflective aspects of learning which are all too often sacrificed in order to cover the all the content of the curriculum. Some may argue that lecture time is not saved as it is invested early in the process to make the recordings, which is true. However, producing a recording of a lecture that is presented multiple times (for example, in large courses), which can also be reused in the following semester or year, can save time on delivering content.

Here at the University of Portsmouth we have a variety of technologies that can assist you with ‘flipping the classroom’ and making your content more engaging, which will both enhance your teaching, and more importantly, improve the students’ learning.

New for the 2016 academic year we have a full lecture capture system for the first time. The UbiCast system is available in a limited number of venues and is now fully operational in the big lecture theatres of Park (Room 2.23 and Eldon West (Room 1.11). It is also available in the Grad School (Room 4.09, St Andrew’s Court) and there is a small seminar room equipped in Dennis Sciama (Room 2.02) where it is intended that content could be created in a ‘studio’ environment without the audience, i.e. for a flipped classroom. DCQE also have a mobile recording unit that can be requested via: elearn@port.ac.uk.

Members of Technology Enhanced Learning will setup the equipment in a suitable venue (please note 30 minutes setup time is required). The UbiCast system will record audio, the content of your screen and video of you presenting – which in the large lecture theatres of Park and Eldon will track you as you walk around the presentation area.

Well established at the University but often underestimated is Relay, a system for capturing screen and audio. In many cases this is all that is required for flipping the classroom – a video of the presenter does not always add value to the content. Relay is available on all standard build PCs via the MyApps portal or can be downloaded from: http://relay.port.ac.uk/ to your personal PC or Mac.

Please note to use Relay you may require a microphone (if the one in the classroom is not connected to the PC), we recommend a simple USB microphone that is easy to carry around. If you need to walk around whilst presenting try a wireless USB microphone such as the RevoLab X-Tag. If you have a webcam, then this can also be incorporated into the Relay recording as a picture in picture (appearing over the content in the bottom right-hand corner) although we would not normally recommend this as it can block some content and may be distracting to the viewer.

Fuse is a free mobile app developed by TechSmith (the developers of Relay), compatible with Android, iOS and Windows mobile devices. Fuse utilises the camera and microphone of your mobile device to record video and upload it to the Relay server where it can be processed and hosted in Compass to easily embed into your Moodle unit(s). If you don’t need a visual from your computer screen or document camera to get your message across why not utilise Fuse to add an introductory video or an interview of a subject specialist to your Moodle unit?