Effective Videos for Education

In this Learning X season, we will guide you through the key steps for making effective videos for education, focusing on practical and basic video creation principles in 5 sections: 

Introduction Before you start recording you will need to plan and organise everything that will be needed for your video. Professional videographers call this planning ‘pre-production’. A typical approach to pre-production planning is to lay out all the elements of your video into a visual structure so that you can work out how the various ‘pieces’ fit. This is the storyboarding process and will often be aided with a video script. A large part of the process will be concentrated on sequencing supporting…

Engagement and Delivery Style    Engagement is how you capture your audience's attention and create a sense of participation. If you can design your video with chapters and a playlist, then your students can actively engage with the learning material, with interactions such as pausing, forwarding, and rewinding. For example, ‘pause’ the video for a quiz or set a learning task. This may require rewinding to review sections of…

What are we talking about when referring to “video ready teaching materials”? In the media world they talk about getting production assets organised. These could be your main footage (A-roll) with some supplemental (B-roll) to help explain or emphasise a topic as well as introductory pre-roll. In the world of commercial media, the purpose is…

Introduction  The videos that you create will have an impact on your students learning. The COVID pandemic has changed the way a lot of videos for education have been recorded. Pre-pandemic, our work with the digital media team, we had the opportunity and luxury of working directly with academics, walking them through the creation process.…

Introduction   In this section we will cover basic editing principles, while trying not to focus too heavily on any specific program, focusing instead on the similarities between various platforms and core principles when editing. We will also keep central how you can use the editing process as another opportunity to maximise the effectiveness of your educational video content. We have all fallen prey to some of the techniques that video makers use to keep us engaged in…

Summary and references  Making an effective video for learning does not need to be complicated. In fact, reducing complexity is best, and this is a recurring theme throughout the series; ‘keeping it simple’ follows the cognitive load principle, helping to make your educational video as accessible as possible, while also helping students to better assimilate or…