Amy Severson

Patricia and Barbara have both mentioned using video as a collaborative learning exercise

How do you set learner expectations in regards to defining learning objectives or working with content? How do you balance the academic objectives with the need to learn software specific skills. What do you say to students who don't know where to start or seem overwhelmed? I'm going to guess that these projects are graded and so one of the motivators are grades? What are some of the other outcomes that you see (anticipated or not?) 

I can imagine that editing answers to questions to five minute sections would indeed be a challenge! 

Did any of your speakers later complain about what was edited out? How do you finess that conversation? 

I remember once reading an article that attention span online drops significantly after just a couple of minutes. I've never again been able to find that article. Does it sound familiar to anyone? 

I worry about the length of our online videos. The prsentations themselves are something like six hours, and so each video is about 1.5 hours. This seems WAY too long for one person to watch online. So I ask myself if the objective is for someone to watch the whole thing (eep), or to browse for the content they're looking for. But then they're losing the context or previous laddered learning to fully appreciate that specific explanation or analogy. 

How do you decide how long your clips will be? 

Hi Barbara, 

Oh, I lived in the state of Minas Gerais for a year in 1991/92, and I loved Brazil. I've been afraid to go back ever since, because I have such good memories. I remember in English class (I was an exchange student), the teacher would use popular songs to teach english. I was always roped in to try and explain idioms - such a challenge! I learned lots of vocabulary by watching dubbed episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 (the original). The story lines and vocabulary used was pretty simple, so it was a great learning opportunity for me. 

You make some interesting points about the length of video. I'm going to start a new thread about length of video, and I wonder if you'd comment there on how you decided on the meximum 4 minute clip. 

Thanks,

amy

Hi Deirdre, 

Now, I may be showing my age, but when you say annotated videos, I think of "pop-up video" from Much Music in the 80's. They'd show the video, and every once in a while a text box would appear with some explanatory text - is that what your annotated video looks like (though perhaps without the irony - grin). Is that sort of what your videos are like? 

I understand that video is gaining a huge traction in Medicine - due to the kinesthetic learning needs? 

Cheers,

Amy