YouTube, not WeTube:
Empowering Instructors to Create
and Deploy Media
JOHN MAKEVICH
INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN COORDINATOR
COLLEGE OF THE CANYONS
SANTA CLARITA, CA

The reason for this presentation
 At our school, many faculty expressed a hesitance to
creating media because of:
Lack of support staff

Fear of the time it will take

Worry about doing it “right”

 Objective: to introduce methods and strategies by
which an individual faculty member can successfully
create valuable content for students without any
support.

The Myths: Are They True?
 I don’t have time to set up the camera and tripod
every day I teach to capture my full lecture.
 I need to produce quality recorded content, so my
amateur filming with a camcorder won’t cut it.
 Where’s my lapel microphone?
 I teach five classes. I just don’t have time to edit the
content I produce and make it available to students
in the same term.

The Assumed Equipment – Do you need all this?
 Professional video camera, possibly HD
 Lapel mic for quality audio
 Tripod
 Audio/visual staff (perhaps) to do the filming
 Audio/visual staff (perhaps) to do the editing
 Captioning?
 And, in the words of James Hutton, famous
geologist, “time, immeasurable time”

Wow! Really?
 If your school has all these resources: great!
 Many schools do not
 Instructors have to do it on their own
 Based on previous description, very difficult

What do the students need?
 Fundamental questions
 Do students expect a studio-quality production?
 Do student benefit from this quality, or does it take away?
Full lecture video (math)
Short lesson on linear equations (math)
 Don’t think about the presenters in these videos nor
the topic. Focus instead on the delivery methods

Is there a Better…Is there a Worse?
 Questions to ask yourself?
 Which videos did effective teaching?
 Did the “professional” recording of the lecture serve as a better
teaching tool than the screen capture recording?
 Which video required more resources (likely)?

From Problem to Solution
 At our school, we have limited resources
 1 Instructional Designer (me), spending much of my time
training and meeting individually with faculty…not much
video time
 Small, helpful A/V staff; calendar full
 Larger, also helpful computer support staff; calendar still full
 Though we could piece it together for a video occasionally, it’s
tough to get all these resources on a frequent basis for
production
 Solving the problem: find a way to get each faculty to
be confident enough to make content alone!

Some equipment
 Portable audio recorder
 Flip Video
(Olympus audio recorders)
(http://www.theflip.com)
 Audacity (free audio editing
 Camtasia (screen capture;
application for Windows
captioning)
and Mac)

The Production Steps
 We’ll use audio as an example.
 Record (with tripod if you like)
 Upload (easy to do with Flip or portable audio
recorders)

The Editing Steps
 May or may not need to edit
 What kinds of editing?
 Basic splitting of clips and reorganizing content
 Full on sound editing, adding still images to clip, etc.
 How do you choose?

Other advantages
 Media becomes more “live”
 Are there advantages to creating more spontaneous content?
 Examples?
 Avoid having to work out schedule conflicts with the
rest of the staff
 What else?

Let’s try this out…
 Quick audio recording
 Upload
 Edit, if you like
 Put into online course

Finding me and this presentation
John Makevich
Instructional Design Coordinator
College of the Canyons
John.Makevich@canyons.edu
The presentation is located on SlideShare:
http://www.slideshare.net/jmakevich