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From Live to Online: My Journey into Online Video Workshop Development
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:
- Twenty second boredom rule: If there was not something visually interesting, a graphic, a joke, or something every 20 seconds or so, we re-scripted and re-shot.
- Publish the run times for each video so that students know how much of their precious time and attention they were committing.
- Clearly articulated resource help and instructions for what was needed to view the videos (high speed Internet access, up-to-date mainstream browser, with Flash plug in). And provide alternative low bandwidth versions for those without the means.
The shooting itself was straight forward. We would set up shots and film each take until I got at least one of them right. Later, the resource developers would edit together the best takes and produce a rough cut. This was then shown to the design team and others for feedback. This feedback process was enormously helpful and many of our best videos were the result of this community feedback process. After several rounds of modifications, the final video was polished up, title and credits were added, and a verbatim script of what was actually said (versus what was in the script) was produced. Each three-minute video took roughly 25 hours to produce spread over a three-week period. Each developer worked on three videos concurrently. Overall, we found that a single summer student could produce about eight videos a season.
During the second year of the project, it was expanded to include other Student Affairs areas. Whereas the first videos were all presented by myself, this time we had many presenters and content ranging from academic integrity to disabilities. There were some additional lessons we learned here. It quickly became apparent that not everyone is equally willing to go through this process. Each presenter, whether Student Affairs professional or student, had to go through a rite of passage of re-shooting their first video two to four times. Even experienced presenters had camera jitters. This was often as frustrating for them as it was for me the first time. We did a number of things to coax our presenters into using this new way of delivering information. First we established a blooper ban policy. All the material that hit the cutting room floor stayed there. No one would be made to look foolish for trying this. Second, we tried to reduce the amount of time the presenters would be on screen by the judicious use of video and graphics. This took the pressure off the presenter to get their lines right. Third, we gave the presenter the final say. In several cases we re-shot or cancelled videos because the presenter was not satisfied even though we thought they were perfectly good videos. Fourth, where it made sense, we used students to present the information. The advantage of using students was that it took the pressure off the content expert who supervised the writing of the video for both writing and presenting. The disadvantage was that the student would also go through the four re-shoot experience but this necessary experiential component was lost when the student graduated or moved on. Finally, although the quality of the video may not be to the highest broadcast standards and may even bet a bit kitschy with its cultural references to Sponge Bob Square Pants, students seemed to not mind this at all. I suspect that students, who have seen so many slickly marketed ads and sites, find a straightforward resource that
has real people doing real things on their campus to be much more interesting and useful. This became a reason to do the video even if they could not be made "perfect."
The project over the last two years has been very well received by professors and students. Our videos have been shown in classrooms by professors and to the Board of Governors by our Dean of Students. In 2004, members of the team won the President's Award for Outstanding Service (Team), McMaster's highest staff award. Since the first launch, we have delivered over 350 hours of academic skills content to students. This is approximately four times the content of our workshop series and is roughly equivalent to a half time counselor serving students individually. We are continuing to create videos this summer. What is astonishing to me is that this was done with two summer students (neither had previous multimedia experience) and under $4000CDN in equipment. We did have the support of a larger project grant for a Flash server and excellent in house support and training from our IT staff. Regardless, the trends of increasing bandwidth, cheap equipment, and easy-to-use video editing technology will make it easier for RONG-P Student Affairs professionals -- without a multimedia degree -- to create their own online video resources tailored to their students' needs and the unique culture of their institution. I believe we can have our High Tech and our High Touch too.
References
Dare, L. (2005). Ten Technologies to Watch & Learn . Source: http://studentaffairs.com/ejournal/Fall_2005. Accessed January 19, 2006 .
Davenport , T. H. & Beck, J. C. (2001). The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Boston , MA: Harvard Business School Press.
McMaster University (2003). Refining Directions. Sources: http://www.mcmaster.ca/pres/refining/report.cfm. Accessed January 19, 2006
Resources
The Video Pilot: http://csd.mcmaster.ca/academic/. Please don't make links to them from your web page. If you would like more information about our project plan and scripting guidelines, please feel free to contact me.
Persona Development: http://www.uie.com/events/roadshow/know_your_users/articles/perfecting_personas
Paper Prototyping: http://www.uie.com/articles/prototyping_tips
Universal Instructional Design:
http://www.tss.uoguelph.ca/uid
http://www.georgianc.on.ca/c4a/uid_principles.htm
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