There is no one right way to create lecture material for an online course. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. I’m going to describe what I do, not because I think it’s “best” but just for interest. The adage "if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter" comes to mind, in that it does take more time to make a succinct video, but I think it is worth it.
One thing that was extremely important to me was preserving my own personal style in the videos. In class I always use the chalkboard (never slides) because there is a huge benefit to seeing problems worked out line by line, and having to write things out forces me (and thus the students) to slow down and think about every step, every part of a definition, even every piece of information given in a problem.
Since I wasn’t going to any conferences this year, I spent the money I would have spent on those acquiring an iPad and Apple Pencil. My original plan was to write lecture notes in OneNote while narrating using the built-in screen recorder. But less than a minute into my first test video, I realized something interesting: while I have no trouble talking while writing on the board, I was completely unable to talk and write with a pencil at the same time! You would think that would be transferable, but writing on a board is a gross motor skill and writing with a pencil/stylus is a fine motor skill.
I thought about creating slides to narrate instead, but I felt that would remove every part of me from the lecture, and I was devastated by that thought. Instead I tested a few other ideas and settled on this process outlined here.
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Write notes while screen recording on iPad
Pretty straightforward. If I make mistakes I can undo and redo until it looks good. What I would normally cover in an 80-minute class usually takes about 50 minutes to write up nicely. I like to include thought bubbles where I think there are interesting things for students to think about.
At this point the video looks like this:
step_1.mp4
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Edit and speed up
I use a free video editor (VSDC Free Video Editor) to cut out any mistakes and ink colour changes, crop the video to make space for subtitles, and most importantly – speed it up 4x. Editing is pretty quick but it takes time to export the video to .mp4 so I take a break.
At this point the video looks like this:
step_2.mp4
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Record audio and edit
I use OBS to capture the video playing and myself recording audio on top of it. I could also include the webcam with my face in the corner, but I’ve been told that can be distracting (since people are naturally drawn to look at faces rather than text) so I don’t. I got a pretty good microphone to record on (Blue Yeti) and close everything else on my computer so there’s not too much ambient background noise. If I want to expand on a point in the notes, I pause the video and keep talking. I always do the audio in one take, but if I mess up I just rewind the video a bit and keep going. It usually takes me about 25 minutes to record. Then I go back to VSDC and edit out any mistakes.
At this point the video looks like this:
step_3.mp4
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Caption and upload
One thing a bunch of students asked for before the term started (I emailed them all about a month before classes asking if there was anything they found helpful in other courses) was subtitles on videos. There are lots of ways to do this but the solution that works well for me is Microsoft Stream. I upload the video there and it automatically generates pretty good captions. It does have a little trouble with some of the math terms (most hilariously, instead of “Poisson” it said “awesome”) so I go in and edit them to fix the math. I could probably skip that step since it does a pretty decent job already, but it does make me happy to have really good accessible captions. Then I upload the video (and captions) to our LMS and also to an unlisted YouTube playlist in case people prefer to watch it there. I also upload a pdf of the notes so students can add to them or just have them.
All together it takes about 3 hours to make a high quality < 20 minute video which covers the content of an 80-minute lecture. Most students seem to be watching the videos, and even more since I created the first assignment and listed times in videos for them to look if they need hints on the questions!
I can also make use of these videos in the future if I teach this course again. I'd love to have students watch portions of these (maybe the parts with definitions only) before class, so we can focus class time on working through examples together.
