So, you’ve decided to create asynchronous lecture content? That’s excellent! Now, you’re here wondering how to make sure that you’re creating materials that your students will watch and even learn from. While there may not be any one-size-fits-all solution or formula for successful learning, we can offer some tips that will help ensure you keep pedagogy in mind throughout the process.<\/p>\n
First, there are so many components than integrate in order to create engaging and meaningful lecture materials and sometimes it’s tough to know exactly where to start. The first thing to consider should be a lesson plan. More information about lesson planning can be found on our lesson planning resource site<\/a>. From there, though, there are still various components to consider: slide presentations, process demonstrations (e.g., software demonstrations, hand calculations), audio (both script and sound effects), and video (both screen sharing and webcam). Now, you might not be including all of these components. But, it’s worth going over each of them.<\/p>\n Most of the time, you can start by making sure that your presentation is aesthetically pleasing. There are intuitive expectations that people have when watching media such that, when these “rules” are broken, something feels “off”. More about media aesthetics can be found on our Best Practices for Creating Quality Educational Videos<\/a> page. Many of the tips from that site (e.g., choose an external microphone) can be backed by both Media Production literature and pedagogical literature. For example, choosing an external microphone is a media production tip to increase the quality of your voice. Incidentally, this increases the signal (that’s you) and decreases the noise (that’s your dishwasher or computer fan, for example). Increasing the signal while decreasing the noise helps to reduce students’ cognitive load. The less they have to do to pay attention to your message, the more mental resources they will have available to learn from it. In short, our Top 5 Tips for creating quality educational videos can be applied to pedagogical tips as well:<\/p>\n However, there are a few more tips to offer from a pedagogical front for two main aspects of creating engaging lecture videos: (1) creating slide decks<\/a> and (2) recording videos<\/a>.<\/p>\n There seems to be a fine line between engaging lecture slides and distracting ones. That line is so fine that we might consider the category boundary between engaging and distracting a very large one. In fact, while some students might find certain components of a slide deck engaging, others might find those same components distracting. It goes back to the argument that Universal Design for Learning theory posits that there is no one-size-fits all solution for teaching and learning. Still, there are a few common themes that might help increase how visually appealing your slides are while simultaneously avoiding distracting your audience.<\/p>\n\n
<\/a>Lecture Slides and Pedagogy<\/h2>\n