Creating advice videos to help students and support your teaching

Hello, my name is Nicholas Morton, and I’m a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve created a series of video resources for undergraduate students designed to offer succinct advice on how to complete different forms of assessment, such as essays, dissertations et cetera.

The idea being by making online assessment guidance available 24/7, students can access the support they need without having to go through the process of waiting for an appointment with one of their tutors.

In this presentation, I’m going to discuss some of the key questions that you might like to consider should you wish to create video resources of this kind to support your own teaching practice.

And to this end, I’m going to be considering a series of questions.

And so, question one, how many videos should you create? Should you, for example, create one long, all-encompassing video providing all known advice on say, essays, or should you perhaps create a cluster of shorter videos offering guidance on different aspects of essay writing?

In my case, I favoured the latter approach; and so, for example, I created videos on essay introductions, essay main paragraphs, essay conclusions. The idea being this approach helps students to access the precise support they need, without wading through large amounts of unnecessary material.

Question two, how long should we make these videos?

Once again, the principle being to give the students the information they’re looking for as quickly as possible. In my own videos, I typically provide the theoretical advice first and then a brief working example, so they can see how the theory works out in practice.

Question three, should these videos focus on the basics or on offering advanced advice for students wishing to achieve higher grades?

In my case, I focused on the basics. But I think this is a really important question to consider because you need to think about exactly where you’re pitching these videos and who is going to be using them.

Okay, question four, how technologically sophisticated should they be?

Now, this is a balancing act. You want the videos to look good, and yet creating shiny, complicated videos with animations can be incredibly time-consuming. So, what I did was just try and strike a balance. I created a toolbox of different video elements, including text boxes, shapes and Post-its and other things that could be used and reused across multiple videos, allowing me to create fairly high-standard videos one after another fairly rapidly.

Next question, how do we make these videos as accessible as possible to the widest range of students?

Now, this is really important, and it formed a major part of my planning; and I can only raise a handful of approaches here.

Naturally, it’s a good idea to provide your video with a transcript, or with subtitles, so that students who cannot hear the presentation will be able to follow its message.

It’s also a good idea to script the video presentation so that the spoken presentation alone can stand alone for students who, for whatever reason, cannot see the video.

You might also like to think about your choice of language in these videos. Not all students will speak, in my case English, as a first language, for example, and so you may need to adjust your key terms or terminology or to introduce key terms as you go through.

OK. These are just a few brief tips. I hope you find them useful.