Videos for your own teaching: didactics, legal aspects and simple production

The inte­gra­tion of videos into teach­ing opens up a wide range of pos­si­bil­i­ties to enrich and sup­port the learn­ing process. Videos not only offer the oppor­tu­nity to depict a vari­ety of for­mats, but also enable acces­si­bil­ity to be taken into account. How­ever, in addi­tion to the didac­ti­cally pos­i­tive aspects, the legal frame­work con­di­tions must not be ignored, espe­cially if videos are to be cre­ated and dis­trib­uted as Open Edu­ca­tional Resources (OER). The ques­tion of pro­duc­tion costs and poten­tial resources are also always a cen­tral com­po­nent when con­sid­er­ing the cre­ation of videos.

OERcamp 2024 Barcamp session: “I want videos”

With all that videos offer but also require, the ques­tion there­fore arises as to how this can be imple­mented in uni­ver­sity oper­a­tions. Is there a low-thresh­old way to pro­duce videos with­out hav­ing to rely on a pro­fes­sional team? We took this ques­tion as an oppor­tu­nity to dis­cuss it at OER­camp 2024 in Ham­burg. Dur­ing our dis­cus­sion about videos and edu­ca­tional films, we real­ized that inter­est in them is extremely high. Our panel included par­tic­i­pants with dif­fer­ent lev­els of expe­ri­ence in the field of video pro­duc­tion — from novices to advanced to pro­fes­sional media design­ers. This diver­sity made it pos­si­ble to shed light on dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives and ideas and to learn together from the expe­ri­ences of oth­ers.

Let videos only be used in indi­vid­ual dis­ci­plines or can they even be used to bring together inter­dis­ci­pli­nary con­tent?

As a first step, we dis­cussed what videos can actu­ally be used for. In which teach­ing sce­nar­ios are videos miss­ing and can they replace out­dated didac­tic for­mats? Be it through exper­i­men­tal set-ups, excur­sions, inter­views, ani­mated videos and more. These diverse sce­nar­ios make it pos­si­ble to con­vey var­ied and prac­ti­cal con­tent to learn­ers. Videos are also used in sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tion and become prac­ti­cal com­pan­ions for stud­ies when the objec­tives, pro­ce­dure and results are explained to par­tic­i­pants and tar­get group-ori­ented com­mu­ni­ca­tion is cho­sen. The use of dif­fer­ent for­mats for the same con­tent makes it pos­si­ble to meet the needs of dif­fer­ent tar­get groups. For exam­ple, if an in-depth under­stand­ing is required, a long video can be cre­ated for a spe­cial­ist audi­ence. Here, com­plex rela­tion­ships can be explained at leisure. At the same time, shorter clips can sum­ma­rize the most rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion and thus pro­vide a quick insight.

Another prac­ti­cal approach is videos in con­junc­tion with QR codes, which make it easy to dis­trib­ute videos. By inte­grat­ing QR codes into fly­ers, infor­ma­tion mate­r­ial or posters, for exam­ple, the respec­tive tar­get group can access the video directly. This reduces the infor­ma­tion den­sity in the printed mate­ri­als and makes it eas­ier to access the con­tent. The vari­ety of for­mats there­fore not only opens up cre­ative free­dom, but also the oppor­tu­nity to design inclu­sive and acces­si­ble edu­ca­tion. In addi­tion to the advan­tage that videos are per­ceived both visu­ally and aurally, other fea­tures of acces­si­ble com­mu­ni­ca­tion can be taken into account in videos. This includes the inte­gra­tion of sub­ti­tles, the con­sid­er­a­tion of color con­trasts for the visu­ally impaired and col­or­blind as well as the avoid­ance of dis­tract­ing back­ground music to reduce stim­uli.

Edit? Yes, please!

When videos are pub­lished as OER, this offers the advan­tage that they can be edited and adapted to indi­vid­ual needs — pro­vided that an appro­pri­ately open license is cho­sen. These advan­tages are rein­forced by OER repos­i­to­ries such as twillo, which offer a wide selec­tion of videos free of adver­tis­ing. OER videos can be found and shared here, mak­ing them acces­si­ble to a wide audi­ence. The cre­ation of videos as OER requires com­pli­ance with license infor­ma­tion and the inte­gra­tion of the most impor­tant meta­data in the end­card in accor­dance with the TULLU+B rule. In addi­tion, it turned out to be advis­able to attach a script and a sto­ry­board in order to make con­tent, set­tings, scenes, cuts and graph­ics trans­par­ent and reusable. At best, how­ever, access to the project file would be pos­si­ble. How­ever, as this is tied to the edit­ing soft­ware, it is only pos­si­ble to open it for sub­se­quent users if you are lucky. It is also impor­tant to deal with issues such as the right to quote in order to ensure an appro­pri­ate dis­cus­sion of the con­tent pre­sented or to con­sider whether copy­righted mate­r­ial, soft­ware or logos can be seen.

“What do I (not) have to be able to do?”

Var­i­ous soft­ware solu­tions are rec­om­mended for edit­ing videos, includ­ing InShot, Luma­Fu­sion and DaVinci Resolve as free or low-cost options that can also be used by novices. The impor­tance of high-qual­ity audio record­ing was also empha­sized, with the pur­chase of a good micro­phone rec­om­mended. On the other hand, very good results can be achieved with cam­era tech­nol­ogy using cell phone cam­eras. For addi­tional equip­ment, uni­ver­si­ties often offer equip­ment rental and advice. It is there­fore worth find­ing exist­ing resources at the uni­ver­si­ties and cre­at­ing syn­er­gies. How­ever, the pro­duc­tion of videos, espe­cially screen­casts, is often asso­ci­ated with legal pit­falls.

Take the plunge and gain practical experience

It was ulti­mately con­cluded that videos are a valu­able ele­ment in teach­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion due to their flex­i­ble appli­ca­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties. Espe­cially for those who are cre­at­ing their own videos for the first time, the amount of work, orga­ni­za­tion and pro­duc­tion can seem daunt­ing. How­ever, this should by no means lead to the com­plete aban­don­ment of video pro­duc­tion. Rather, videos should be used to try out new for­mats, gain prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence and prac­tice using them. By cre­at­ing videos, teach­ers and learn­ers alike can ben­e­fit from the diverse pos­si­bil­i­ties and inno­v­a­tive poten­tial of this medium.

Publish your videos

You can eas­ily pub­lish OER videos on twillo or the TIB’s AV-Por­tal or find and reuse videos from oth­ers.

Further information

In the blog arti­cle series “What are teach­ing and learn­ing videos?”, Sönke Hahn takes a closer look at char­ac­ter­is­tics and didac­tics, for­mats and meth­ods and, finally, poten­tials and crit­i­cism. The arti­cles offer you the oppor­tu­nity to delve even deeper into the topic.