Peter Walsh, M.Ed.
Academic Skills Counselor, Centre for Student Development
McMaster University , Hamilton , ON , Canada
pwalsh@mcmaster.ca
Posted: February 2006 Student Affairs Online, vol. 7 no. 1 - Summer 2005
Demand for academic success has increased every year that I have been in the business of helping students get better grades and yet it is getting harder to deliver. Whether I work with students who are struggling to get off academic probation or the student who bursts into tears because she is "bombing" second year with only B's it seems that this generation is more concerned about making it and yet are more reluctant then ever to be seen getting help. Concurrent with this student trend has been one in computing: more speed, 24/7 access, and cheaper equipment and software. In 2003, these two trends met and I saw an opportunity. Faced with increasing student demand for academic skills and a reluctance to seek services other than through individual confidential counseling, the Centre for Student Development (CSD), with the generous support of the Dean of Students and Special Projects funding, set out to pilot the development of online video skill workshops that would be anonymous and available 24/7. After eight years in the profession, over 500 presentation hours, and probably 20,000+ student hours of contact, I hoped that I could create the right mix of motivation, insight, and effective skills to help students succeed even when I am not in the room; in fact, even while I was at home and sound asleep. Over the summer of 2004 we created our first twelve academic skills videos. These videos were the "best of the best" of the many presentations that I have delivered -- I used all my good jokes. What began as a small project has turned into a multi-year commitment to create a critical mass of online video based resources for students (still in progress) and along the way we created, and probably recreated, the wheel several times. Eight thousand (8000) downloads and over 350 hours of streamed content later, our first attempt has proven to be wildly successful. What started as student academic success videos, have been extended to include resources on personal development, career, academic integrity, and international
student transition.
With increasing bandwidth, cheaper digital imaging and editing technology, and the growing user friendliness of digital editing software, I believe these trends open a door for many institutions to create their own institution-specific video resources. The advantages of video resources over static print based online materials is that it holds together our student's fragmented attention. Davenport and Beck (2001) in their book The Attention Economy state, "Understanding and managing attention is now the single most important determinant of business success" (p. 3). It is even truer for students. Online print resources (i.e. text only) are easy to create, but are poor online competitors to video, podcasting, Flash animation, and other emerging interactive tools. As part of the foray into video workshops, we adopted some ideas from Davenport and Beck and Universal Instructional Design (especially those related to multimodal instruction) while using a multimedia development process. I hope to share with you some of what our team and I learned in pursuing this goal. I should point out, that I am a "RONG-P" to use Leslie Dare's acronym: "regular ol' non-geeky person" (Dare, 2005). If I can do this, I believe more RONG-P Student Affairs professionals can, too.
Before getting into the details, there is one thing that must be acknowledged. McMaster University is a center of innovation both in research and in Student Affairs. Without a culture of risk taking and innovation, such a project as this would have been very difficult to achieve. I have been in other institutional settings where new ideas were questioned more than supported. However, when your president says in a public document: "Being afraid to fail smothers the innovative spirit and we must learn to accept failure in order to risk success" (McMaster University , 2003) and Student Affairs leadership actively endorses and supports this sentiment, then great things can happen. The importance of acknowledging risk taking was demonstrated to me at my first meeting with our design team. This team consisted of three seasoned professional from IT, a multimedia and marketing professional, two summer students, and invited guests from three different Student Affairs departments. The first things out of my mouth were "This is a pilot. We may fail. If it fails, that is okay." Of course, I knew that this project could work, even if in a much restricted form. So I knew it would not fail. But they did not. As soon as the permission to fail was granted, the tense shoulders dropped, the protection of turf disappeared, and some of the best ideas and the most dedicated work of these professionals were put to use in this project. I should point out, that two of the IT professionals were not even in our department. But such was the commitment throughout Student Affairs to breaking down barriers to innovation and risking failure, that Career Services and First Year Experience as well my department CSD, came together to do something that none of us could have done alone. This was one of the best teams with which I have had the privilege to work. We exceeded any of our expectations. Your success at replicating our experience will, I fear, depend greatly on your personal, departmental and divisional tolerance for risk and "failure." I
hope that some of what follows will lower the failure threshold for you.
From the beginning, we followed a project management plan and used several multimedia techniques to find the characteristics of the "ideal" study skills video. We first drew together a team of two student resource developers (former academic peer helpers), Student Affairs professionals, and our IT staff. The resource developers would shoot and edit all the video. The IT staff would provide support and training. I would both be the "star" of the videos and the project manager. After some online research (seeing what others were doing in this area) and attending a workshop on multimedia development, we launched into the project. Our first major task was to develop a persona. A persona, for those unfamiliar with the term, is an idealized "person" that represents the typical user of your service. Ours was named Julia. She was your typical, ambitious, info-stressed (to use Davenport & Beck's (2001) term) first-year student surfing the net for help at 2:33AM the night before an exam. Julia would not seek "counseling" because she did not see her self as having a "problem." We assumed that she was in a hurry, distracted by her two open chat sessions, and intolerant of fluff and bad site design. Having read Davenport and Beck's book on the attention economy, we became aware that her most precious resource was not her time, but her attention. We tested all our design and content decisions against whether Julia would approve, or just click away to something else. We also paper prototyped the interface. Paper prototyping uses good old paper, scissors, and glue to create a version of what you want to see on the screen. It has been used in multimedia design to save time and avoid costly mistakes (see resources for more information). During this process, we came to a number of conclusions and design guidelines that have proven to be very successful for us.
First, we recognized the information overload problem. Students would not tolerate a long wait time for information or information that was not directly related to their immediate concern. We had noticed that many other videos were twelve minutes or longer. Our student developers commented that time runs differently online; 10 minutes is a very long time to pay attention in virtual space. As a result, one of our earliest decisions was to make each video about the length of a music video (3-5 minutes). I had to cut out all of the fluff that would otherwise make a live presentation interesting and get to the key points fast. We also eliminated preambles ("Hi, my name is Peter and today …") so that students would get into the "meat" immediately.
Second, we anticipated the presence of online competitors for our student's attention. We assumed Julia was one millisecond away from clicking away to somewhere else. This meant a rejection of the "talking head" approach common in traditional lectures. Clearly, I could not simply present as I usually did with a captive audience. This audience could zap me for poor performance at any time. This placed a great demand on myself to write a script that was engaging and yet still 3-5 minutes long. Several drafts had to be made until I could get something that was compact, to the point, and still funny and attention grabbing. If writing was a challenge, even a greater demand was placed on me when I had to try and remember my lines in front of a camera! One principle we endorsed was that the presenter had to look directly into the eye of the camera. Poor eye contact because of trying to read a script off to the side meant a fast-click-away death. Because of this, my first video was re-shot four times till I learned how to do this. Subsequent experience with other professionals getting in front of the camera suggests that this just was not my particular lack of acting ability but a rite of passage that any newbie had to go through.
Third, we wanted the visuals on the screen to not just create movement and interest but visually convey information. We used Macro media Flash to develop many of the animations that I had in the past drawn on a whiteboard or done on an overhead. This quickly lead to a discovery: it is much easier to cut and paste sound than video. Since I was making so many mistakes in the takes, we took every opportunity to insert a graphic, a "B roll" video clip, or an animation, to bridge over my blunders. These extra video clips lead to the creation of some of the more humorous scenes (see Full Frontal Learning).
Fourth, we wanted to make the videos look and feel like McMaster. The decision to put the counselor on the screen instead of a theatre student was based on the assumption that the student wanted a recognizable authority on the screen: someone that they might see walking around on campus. It worked. Not long after the launch, I was "spotted" and stopped in the hall by a student asking if I was "that Peter Walsh from those videos?" I felt like a star! We also shot many of our videos in recognizable campus locales for the same reason. Students could quickly see that this was a video for them.
In addition to the content principles above, we made some technical decisions. We would provide open captioning for all our videos so that students with hearing impairments could watch them and follow along. We decided to use streamed video instead of downloaded video files for faster access time and to better protect our intellectual property. We chose to deliberately build for the future and so chose standards that may have exceeded some student's bandwidth capacity while providing a low bandwidth verbatim transcript alternative. We asked our viewers to grade us and make comments through an easy to use online interface. To date, over 200 users have graded us. So far, 80% think we deserve an A- or better.
Some other principles and lessons learned: