Page 13 - Campus Technology, January/February 2018

ONLINE LEARNING dian schaffhauser 5 Ways to Make Your Videos Binge-Worthy
Video doesn’t need to be a passive medium. Here’s how to keep students watching and make them feel like they have a stake in their own learning outcomes.
A FACULTY MEMBER at New York University’s Stern School of Business entered Amanda Justice’s office, apparently after binge-viewing Breaking Bad. “He asked me if we could end [his videos] with a cliff hanger,” recalled the educational technologist. She remembered thinking, “This is an operations course. I don’t really know off the top of my head how we could get Breaking Bad-level engagement and trauma into it.”
On the other hand, that’s just the kind of challenge Justice and her colleagues on Stern’s Learning Science team within the W.R. Berkley Innovation Labs like to tackle. Maybe they wouldn’t be dealing with an “insane meth problem at the end of the lecture,” but they could certainly come up with new ways to engage students and make them care about the outcome of a given topic after a video is over.
As Justice and her colleagues, Kristen Sosulski and Ben Bowman, emphasized in a presentation at the recent OLC Innovate conference, if you find that you’re pumping out videos like a factory product, it may be time to step back and reconsider how well your results really work for your students. “Rethinking the Video Lecture for Student Engagement” explored five areas where the Learning Science team pushes itself to try new approaches for producing videos that will make students feel like they have a stake in the learning experience.4
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2018
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