What are teaching and learning videos? Part II: Formats and methods

Teach­ing and learn­ing videos are potent forces in mod­ern teach­ing. But with micro-lec­tures, nuggets and the like — to name just a few terms — the ter­mi­nol­ogy in this field is likely to cause many a frown. In order to pro­vide an overview and to bet­ter rec­og­nize the poten­tial and pos­si­ble appli­ca­tions of videos in teach­ing, we present teach­ing and learn­ing video for­mats — in a field of ten­sion between inten­tion or for­mats and the tech­nol­ogy used, meth­ods of real­iza­tion and pro­duc­tion val­ues.

Last time, we pro­vided a basic def­i­n­i­tion of teach­ing and learn­ing videos and iden­ti­fied four char­ac­ter­is­tics: Teach­ing and learn­ing videos are an audio-visu­al­iza­tion that can be accessed inde­pen­dently of time and place, if nec­es­sary, and are didac­ti­cally pre­pared and clas­si­fied. We have clas­si­fied them didac­ti­cally and out­lined how and in which sce­nar­ios videos can be used. With the so-called mul­ti­me­dia prin­ci­ples, we have become famil­iar with a cat­a­log that pro­vides ori­en­ta­tion in order to opti­mize the design of videos with a view to learn­ing. Now we want to look specif­i­cally at the 2 + 1 cat­e­gories in the field of teach­ing and learn­ing videos that have already been out­lined — lec­tures and (spe­cial­ist) pre­sen­ta­tions on video (live, as record­ings), explana­tory videos and demon­stra­tion videos — and relate these to pro­duc­tion forms.

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One side of the coin: the three for­mat cat­e­gories — now it’s all about the for­mats within these cat­e­gories
Image by Sönke Hahn, released under CC 0 (1.0)

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First, we want to locate the three pil­lars within the medium of film. We will then describe spe­cific for­mats within these three pil­lars. And then con­trast these with the tech­niques and processes used. These meth­ods and tech­niques mark the sec­ond side of the coin in the field of teach­ing and learn­ing video — we have already touched on them with con­cepts such as ani­ma­tions or screen­casts.

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Famil­iar to us from the first part of this blog series: the field of teach­ing and learn­ing videos as a whole — both sides are defined in more detail below.
Image by Sönke Hahn, released under CC BY 4.0

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The expla­na­tions are pre­ceded by a usage note: It is cer­tainly advis­able to start with the overview of for­mats and pro­ce­dures as a whole in order to gain back­ground knowl­edge. Nev­er­the­less, and this is why the table of con­tents now fol­lows, it would also be pos­si­ble to search for spe­cific for­mats or to select the rel­e­vant knowl­edge directly.

Classification of the formats of teaching and learning videos in the field of moving images

In order to refine the basic def­i­n­i­tion given in the first part of this blog post and the type cat­e­gories out­lined there in the field of teach­ing and learn­ing videos — lec­ture, explana­tory videos, demon­stra­tion videos — and to name for­mats, it is worth tak­ing a brief look at the mov­ing image as a whole. In this way, teach­ing and learn­ing videos can be placed in a larger con­text, the medium of film.

One of the “most impor­tant dis­tin­guish­ing cri­te­ria” (Kamp 2017: 142) in the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of the mov­ing image is the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between “fic­tional” and “non-fic­tional”. “Fic­tional” refers to scenic pro­duc­tions, while “non-fic­tional” refers to the doc­u­men­tary exam­i­na­tion of what is col­lo­qui­ally referred to as real­ity (Kamp 2017: 142 f.). The aim of non-fic­tional for­mats is to show facts and their facets in a fac­tual, clear and con­cise man­ner or to make them acces­si­ble to the audi­ence (Kamp 2017: 145). Edu­ca­tional videos are there­fore likely to for­mally belong to the non-fic­tional com­plex.

In prac­tice, it is almost impos­si­ble to make this dis­tinc­tion with­out over­laps — even when it comes to edu­ca­tional videos. That is why we have spo­ken of “for­mal”. Because fic­tion nat­u­rally deals with real­ity, albeit on a dif­fer­ent, con­tent-related level, just like non-fic­tion: even a sci­ence fic­tion film can (and must) deal with top­ics from our every­day lives (in order to find an audi­ence), deal with social prob­lems of the present — despite (or pre­cisely because of) the detour via an imag­ined future. Abstrac­tion can there­fore cer­tainly offer the poten­tial to approach a topic from a dis­tance — in teach­ing, in audio­vi­sual for­mats.

In this respect, but also beyond this, the fol­low­ing for­mats should not be under­stood as irrev­o­ca­ble with regard to the con­cep­tion and pro­duc­tion of edu­ca­tional and explana­tory videos and used accord­ingly. After all, a look “out­side the box” can pro­vide inspi­ra­tion — in line with the mul­ti­me­dia prin­ci­ples out­lined in the first part of this blog post : fea­ture film sequences can enrich his­tor­i­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion (≈ reen­act­ment — Kamp 2017: 149), so that “only” ver­bal infor­ma­tion can actu­ally be illus­trated (Kamp 2017: 145). An illus­tra­tive story, avatars and the appear­ance of the per­son giv­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion can also sup­port the neu­tral com­mu­ni­ca­tion of a sub­ject mat­ter and fos­ter loy­alty to the sub­ject mat­ter on the part of the audi­ence, in our case learn­ers (≈ per­son­al­iza­tion prin­ci­ple).

We have already touched on the for­mal aspects of the story and the speak­ers appear­ing, over and above the con­tent poten­tial of the mov­ing image. With regard to form and con­tent, it must also be noted (with a view to the first post in this blog series: again) that they are prac­ti­cally insep­a­ra­ble. One poten­tial of film, under­stood as so-called live action footage or real footage, is that it can depict top­ics “as they are” at first glance. (For the sake of com­plete­ness, how­ever, it is impor­tant not to fall prey to the com­mon mis­con­cep­tion that pho­to­re­al­is­tic images are the same as truth or real­ity. Every medium has its own char­ac­ter­is­tics and so a film shot is always only a sec­tion that is more or less con­sciously cho­sen and there­fore always omits or has to omit one piece of infor­ma­tion in favor of another).

On the other hand, ani­ma­tions (apart from pho­to­re­al­is­tic, nowa­days often com­puter-gen­er­ated forms) would be more suit­able for depict­ing com­plex issues: “In this con­text, it has been shown that a schematic sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of visual learn­ing con­tent is con­ducive to the con­cep­tual acqui­si­tion of knowl­edge com­pared to real­is­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tions” (Merkt/Schwan 2018: 2). How­ever, if the con­tent depicted is to be rec­og­nized in the real world (med­ical tools, etc.), real­is­tic images should be con­sid­ered (Merkt/Schwan 2018: 2). The degree of abstrac­tion or real­ism of a teach­ing and learn­ing video must there­fore be weighed up on a case-by-case basis.

How­ever, the afore­men­tioned the­o­ret­i­cal dis­tinc­tion between fic­tion and non-fic­tion is soft­ened sim­ply by the fact that doc­u­men­tary as a spe­cific form belongs to the doc­u­men­tary or non-fic­tional for­mats (e.g. Kamp 2017: 148 f.). Doc­u­men­ta­tion is there­fore a sub-form of doc­u­men­tary. Or, more specif­i­cally and as an antic­i­pa­tion, a screen­cast can be both doc­u­men­tary in nature and pro­mo­tional beyond instruc­tion ≈ an insight into soft­ware before it is pur­chased. Applied to edu­ca­tion, a sub­ject mat­ter, a method, etc. can be made “palat­able” in this way, even if it is cer­tainly not nec­es­sar­ily of a poten­tially lurid nature. With­out los­ing sight of the noble goals of teach­ing, it is advis­able to be aware of the fun­da­men­tally sim­i­lar com­mu­ni­ca­tion mech­a­nisms in the fields of edu­ca­tion and “com­merce” and, if nec­es­sary, to take them into account.

Indus­trial films and image films are also likely to be com­plex in terms of fic­tion and non-fic­tion: On the one hand, tech­ni­cal aspects or func­tions should be explained soberly, while on the other hand, these for­mats are often intended to pro­mote a prod­uct (Kamp 2017: 150). An image film as a whole, and not just part of its struc­ture, can be under­stood as a teaser that is intended to whet the appetite for more (Kamp 2017: 150). This touches on an old method of build­ing up films and sto­ries beyond the mov­ing image, which is also used in edu­ca­tional videos and cor­re­sponds to the zeit­geist: this refers to the teaser or cold open, some­thing called a hook, which is intended to pro­vide an intro­duc­tion in medias res. The imme­di­ate access designed by the pro­ducer is intended to arouse inter­est and/or explain what is to come and its added value, so that in the face of media noise or over­sup­ply, an audi­ence is more likely to “stay tuned” — also with regard to edu­ca­tional videos.

The two sides of the coin in the field of teaching and learning videos

Despite the fore­see­able vague­ness in the def­i­n­i­tion of the for­mats of edu­ca­tional videos (in the first part of this blog post and in the dis­tinc­tion between fic­tion and non-fic­tion), it makes sense to divide them into dif­fer­ent for­mats. This pro­vides an overview. These for­mats are the first side of the coin.

How­ever, in order to give expres­sion to the obvi­ous com­plex­ity of the com­plex of edu­ca­tional and explana­tory videos, we will con­trast the edu­ca­tional and learn­ing video for­mats with a sec­ond pole — as the sec­ond side of the coin. As already men­tioned, we also encoun­tered this sec­ond field in the first part of the blog series with ref­er­ence to the means used in video pro­duc­tion (ani­ma­tion, screen­cast, etc.).

In the fol­low­ing, we will there­fore start from the dif­fer­ent for­mats and often asso­ci­ated roles of the authors — on the one hand, you as the pro­ducer and your inten­tions dur­ing the prepa­ra­tion of a sub­ject mat­ter in video form. On the other hand, pro­duc­tion meth­ods and the tech­nol­ogy used in the real­iza­tion of a film or the dif­fer­ent elab­o­rate processes will be taken into account.
Over­all, the aim is to raise aware­ness of an impor­tant area of ten­sion in the plan­ning and pro­duc­tion of teach­ing and learn­ing videos — an area between econ­omy, inten­tion, skills and resources.

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The first page in the field of teach­ing and learn­ing videos in focus
Image by Sönke Hahn, released under CC BY 4.0

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Page 1: Formats and intentions

At this point, we encounter the three for­mat cat­e­gories already men­tioned sev­eral times — lecture/lecture, explana­tory video, demon­stra­tion video. We already intro­duced them in the first part of this blog post. In the fol­low­ing, we will spec­ify these three pil­lars as far as pos­si­ble and appro­pri­ate. The terms instruc­tional and edu­ca­tional video con­tinue to serve as a generic term.

Recording of lectures and presentations

As announced, the poles in the field of ten­sion between teach­ing and learn­ing videos can­not be strictly sep­a­rated. It there­fore makes sense to explain this first for­mat cat­e­gory in the field of edu­ca­tional videos by look­ing at the pro­duc­tion per­spec­tive. Three forms can be dis­tin­guished:

• Record­ing of a lec­ture or pre­sen­ta­tion held in front of a live audi­ence — as a file or streamed live. This is also referred to as a “live dig­i­tized lec­ture” (Per­sike 2019: 4).
• Broad­cast of a lec­ture from a stu­dio, which in turn is streamed live and/or recorded for later retrieval (two to three flies …).
• a pre-pro­duced unit, with­out live stream­ing. This process is also referred to as an “e‑lecture” (Per­sike 2019: 5, Harder n.d.: 103): They can or should be of a high-qual­ity nature. In addi­tion, they are con­sid­ered shorter and more focused com­pared to the record­ing of a course (Per­sike 2019: 5, Harder n.d.: 103).
  

The record­ings of entire lec­tures offer the poten­tial to attend a course inde­pen­dently of time and place. There is also the didac­tic advan­tage that the mate­r­ial can be stopped or viewed again and again (Rosen­baum 2018: n.p.). The record­ing offers fol­low-up poten­tial (Aldrian 2019: 5) if the con­tent of the live lec­ture or class­room lec­ture needs to be deep­ened or repeated. The sit­u­a­tion is dif­fer­ent for live lec­tures that are streamed. How­ever, if no later pub­li­ca­tion or record­ing is planned, these can still be viewed regard­less of loca­tion, so that it is not nec­es­sary to come together in per­son, on site, in pres­ence.

The record­ing of a face-to-face event tends to allow long-term use of the same event ≈ effi­ciency — from the point of view of the teacher. How­ever, depend­ing on the resources avail­able, a filmed event can appear unpol­ished in terms of image and sound and not always be ide­ally com­pre­hen­si­ble: “inci­den­tally” filmed slides brought in by pro­jec­tor on site can become illeg­i­ble in the video file — espe­cially if the event is cap­tured from a dis­tance with­out a sec­ond, close-up cam­era shot, with­out zoom, etc. For fur­ther use, it may there­fore be appro­pri­ate to edit the video to com­pen­sate for lengths or ambi­gu­i­ties. How­ever, this should not result in a patch­work quilt — a sub­se­quent one-off inser­tion of a slide, oth­er­wise “only” one view of the room, slides and per­son giv­ing the lec­ture, is likely to cause more irri­ta­tion than sense.

Over­all — despite all the eco­nomic poten­tial accord­ing to the motto “two birds with one stone” — it should be pointed out that an e‑lecture and a face-to-face lec­ture are quasi dif­fer­ent media, they are two media forms in the field of lec­tures etc.: The dynamic in pres­ence, the phys­i­cal effect of the per­son giv­ing the lec­ture on an audi­ence on site tends to be lost in the record­ing, based on the cropped fram­ing — sim­i­lar to how the leg­i­bil­ity of the slides is risked in the con­text of a video filmed from a dis­tance, from behind the room. Mod­ern web­cams with auto­track­ing, pan­ning and zoom­ing func­tions can com­pen­sate for these dif­fer­ences to some extent, as the cam­era auto­mat­i­cally fol­lows you as the per­son giv­ing the lec­ture and can be con­trolled by ges­ture, i.e. with­out addi­tional helpers, such as zoom­ing. Nev­er­the­less, it remains the case that the slides pre­sented via pro­jec­tor can only be read to a lim­ited extent: A live broad­cast of a face-to-face event there­fore requires a slide design with large font and lit­tle text. It may also be nec­es­sary to release the mate­ri­als in par­al­lel, e.g. using the screen shar­ing func­tion of con­fer­ence soft­ware, or to inte­grate the slides in post-pro­duc­tion at a later stage. In this sense, nei­ther of the two media can be com­pletely sat­is­fied. In this respect, live pre­sen­ta­tions on site dif­fer from those via stream in terms of plan­ning, imple­men­ta­tion and recep­tion. And both fields must be dis­tin­guished from pre-pro­duced con­tent:

A pre-pro­duced teach­ing unit devi­ates from the con­cept of “sev­eral flies”. Ini­tially, a lec­ture is usu­ally given with­out an audi­ence. This offers the oppor­tu­nity to cre­ate a high-qual­ity audio­vi­sual expe­ri­ence: Instead of being filmed from a dis­tance and pos­si­bly cap­tured with a micro­phone per­ma­nently installed in the cam­era, it is pos­si­ble to inter­act acousti­cally clearly with the imag­ined audi­ence on the other side of the lens (for appear­ance’s sake) dur­ing the film­ing by using a clip-on micro­phone and/or boom pole. This allows the speaker to be brought more into focus. In this way, a closer rela­tion­ship can be achieved with the (later) audi­ence. This can also fos­ter a bond with the sub­ject mat­ter being con­veyed (≈ per­son­al­iza­tion prin­ci­ple). In any case, pas­sages can be repeated and re-recorded if they are dis­liked. Cau­tion: An overly trained, stilted style of speech has an arti­fi­cial effect and can dis­rupt the bond in terms of the per­son­al­iza­tion prin­ci­ple. The slides can be com­bined with the speak­er’s mate­r­ial in high res­o­lu­tion via edit­ing or image split­ting (pic­ture in pic­ture, split screen, etc.). And even if only one cam­era is avail­able, it is still pos­si­ble to change set­tings for vari­ety and didac­tic pur­poses: The record­ing allows inter­rup­tions for rebuild­ing, so that impor­tant infor­ma­tion can be added from close up and made more com­pre­hen­si­ble for teach­ers.

Recorded live stream­ing in a stu­dio envi­ron­ment turns out to be a hybrid. Ini­tially, this method with­out an audi­ence ben­e­fits from bet­ter light­ing and more eye con­tact with the vir­tual audi­ence. If dif­fer­ent shot sizes were to be used dur­ing live broad­casts, auto­mated, ges­ture-con­trolled cam­eras, mul­ti­ple cam­eras or assis­tants would be required. How­ever, even if bloop­ers and pos­si­ble lengths “hap­pened” dur­ing the live stream­ing, the excel­lent mate­r­ial can be used to tighten up or even — thanks to the con­sis­tent stu­dio sit­u­a­tion — par­tially re-record any pas­sages with­out the audi­ence watch­ing the video file notic­ing.

For the sake of com­plete­ness, please refer to the video pod­cast. It is con­sid­ered a sub-form of the e‑lecture (Per­sike 2019: 5). A video pod­cast is ini­tially a lec­ture pro­duced with lit­tle effort that cap­tures a per­son or an exchange between sev­eral peo­ple on a spe­cific topic (sim­i­lar to an inter­view) with­out a lot of image changes. A flipchart or white­board can be used for this. This can be used to develop top­ics in a (sim­u­lated) dia­log with the vir­tual audi­ence. The “usual” class­room or office can serve as the set­ting for the “film­ing”. How­ever, the tran­si­tions to more elab­o­rate design approaches (stu­dio) and other for­mats are fluid. Sim­i­lar to purely acoustic pod­casts and their tran­si­tions to radio plays, musi­cal, pre-pro­duced or even staged con­tent can be added (planned) after­wards, for exam­ple.

Explanatory videos

As the first part of this blog post should have made clear, there is no sin­gle def­i­n­i­tion of explana­tory videos. There is no doubt that explana­tory videos are shorter than a record­ing of a lec­ture; com­pared to a recorded face-to-face event, they are likely to be more elab­o­rate in terms of ani­ma­tions, music and tran­si­tions. Ulti­mately, a length of between 1–20 min­utes can be assumed (Harder n.d.: 103. and Ebner/Schön 2017: 3). The “nugget” men­tioned in the intro­duc­tion to this sec­ond part of the blog post can be under­stood as a very short (not only) video­graphic teach­ing unit. It can there­fore be assigned to this for­mat cat­e­gory. Over­all, clas­sic for­mats that fall into the explana­tory video cat­e­gory — reportage, report, etc. — are likely to be longer in anal­ogy to cin­ema and tele­vi­sion, or such a length may be famil­iar to learn­ers from habit (again cin­ema, tele­vi­sion). In antic­i­pa­tion of a digres­sion below, how­ever, the cri­te­rion of time should not be used as a defin­i­tive char­ac­ter­is­tic to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between edu­ca­tional and instruc­tional video.

Report

In the field of mov­ing images, this con­cept is pri­mar­ily asso­ci­ated with tele­vi­sion news pro­grams (Kamp 2017, 146): In just a few min­utes, a process, a fact, is to be explored in depth. The fol­low­ing struc­ture, which is also used in news­pa­pers, lends itself to this: First, the event is described. Then it is explained how it came about, the con­se­quences are named and finally the result is eval­u­ated. (Kamp 2017: 146)

“Eval­u­a­tion” already says it all: the author appears here, he or she strives for objec­tiv­ity, as it were (Kamp 2017: 146). The inten­tion is a cer­tain authen­tic­ity or evi­den­tiary func­tion — he, she, div. is “just” there. More­over: The report is not only related to the news­pa­per arti­cle, but also to a cin­e­matic strat­egy, the hook: after an overview, infor­ma­tive, even cap­ti­vat­ing intro­duc­tion, details fol­low.

Reportage

Reportages are char­ac­ter­ized by a more obvi­ous, namely nar­ra­tive note, inso­far as they are intended to encour­age the audi­ence to expe­ri­ence them in the course of an authen­tic descrip­tion. The dis­tance between the jour­nal­ist and what is shown is less than in a report. The “doc­u­ment­ing” per­sons are some­times even inte­grated into the events, even suf­fer­ing with them or try­ing out what has been done in front of the cam­era. This pres­ence is empha­sized by the reporter appear­ing visu­ally more often, mak­ing per­sonal state­ments and com­ments. (Kamp 2017: 148)

Tip

On the one hand, it is gen­er­ally advis­able to have the pre­sen­ter appear in the pic­ture “every now and then” / have them appear in front of the cam­era due to the effec­tive­ness of the “human medium”, at least for longer instruc­tional and explana­tory videos. This can pro­mote the bond between the pre­sen­ter and the audi­ence and thus also the com­mu­ni­ca­tion of any con­tent (≈ per­son­al­iza­tion prin­ci­ple). To empha­size the “can”, it should also be men­tioned that the research sit­u­a­tion on the appear­ance of speak­ers is ambigu­ous — we will come back to this in the third part of this blog post. In any case, and as a pos­si­ble side effect: loos­en­ing up and struc­tur­ing are pos­si­ble (with longer videos). In the case of short films aimed at instruc­tions, a “per­sonal” appear­ance can be dis­pensed with (≈ coher­ence prin­ci­ple).

Documentations

Doc­u­men­taries are more ana­lyt­i­cal than reports and doc­u­men­taries. In them, the author’s per­sonal dis­tance from the sub­ject mat­ter dealt with in the film is par­tic­u­larly empha­sized. Opin­ions tend to be taboo in doc­u­men­taries. The sec­ond cri­te­rion for the def­i­n­i­tion of a doc­u­men­tary is the time dif­fer­ence between the broadcast/production and the sub­ject mat­ter of the doc­u­men­tary. The doc­u­men­tary can or should there­fore offer a cer­tain degree of com­plete­ness while pro­vid­ing an overview. (Kamp 2017: 148 f.) So-called edu­ca­tional films are con­sid­ered doc­u­men­tary and should be a max­i­mum of 15 min­utes long (Harder n.d.: 103), although the con­cep­tual blur­ring, the syn­ony­mous use of “film” and “video”, should be con­sid­ered here.

Interviews

This for­mat ini­tially describes a means to an end and an ele­ment that rarely stands on its own or is used in the con­text of other mov­ing images: For exam­ple, inter­views can be part of doc­u­men­taries or reports in order to allow those involved to have their say. They thus offer prox­im­ity, can sub­stan­ti­ate state­ments by wit­nesses, and can pro­mote a loos­en­ing, atten­tion-grab­bing rhythm. A stand-alone inter­view, which can be accessed via a learn­ing plat­form, for exam­ple, should have a demon­stra­tive note — in the sense of Per­sike’s (2019: 5) expla­na­tions. It could there­fore also be assigned to the “+1”, the third for­mat cat­e­gory we have defined.

Tutorials

To the point, straight­for­ward — that’s how this type can be described at first glance. These clas­sics are videos that explain the func­tion of soft­ware as a whole or just one aspect of it. They are rel­a­tively short, often only a few min­utes long. Tuto­ri­als can there­fore cer­tainly be asso­ci­ated with the term “nugget”, which is not only used for mov­ing media teach­ing units, as a descrip­tion of a short teach­ing unit.

These videos often do not stand on their own — espe­cially in the case of soft­ware train­ing. They can there­fore be inte­grated into a help sec­tion of a web­site, as part of a series, so to speak. Music is often even omit­ted here. In order to get to the point quickly, a screen­cast (see below) and nar­ra­tor text are started imme­di­ately after a short title bar. Screen­casts of soft­ware to pro­vide an insight into a pro­gram to be learned are the char­ac­ter­is­tic fea­ture of a tuto­r­ial (Harder n.d.: 103).

At sec­ond glance, but still quite short, onboard­ing videos must be under­stood as tuto­ri­als — to intro­duce new employ­ees or to get them in the mood for a course. How­ever, such videos can be real­ized more elab­o­rately — with music, ani­ma­tions, i.e. far beyond a screen­cast. These steps even make sense if the video is intended to pro­mote your course series and poten­tially retain learn­ers. Such and also longer tuto­ri­als, even in con­nec­tion with a series of sev­eral lessons, can start with a teaser (also known as a hook, cold open) to intro­duce and cap­ti­vate for the sub­se­quent, longer con­tent. In the course of a series of videos, a recap (the reca­pit­u­la­tion of pre­vi­ous steps/units/videos) can or should even be included in order to reac­tive exist­ing knowl­edge on the part of learn­ers to com­pen­sate for an inter­val between the units and/or the appear­ance of the videos. Depend­ing on the form of deliv­ery (via com­mon plat­forms or via an HP5 plu­gin), chap­ter mark­ers can be set so that a recap can be skipped. This can be use­ful if the pre­vi­ous video has just been viewed and/or pre­vi­ous con­tent is still present.

Longer tuto­ri­als (or gen­er­ally stand-alone doc­u­men­taries, reports, etc.) can and should have a more elab­o­rate and there­fore longer intro that favors or at least reflects the mood of the series, course, etc. This intro marks not only a spe­cific video, but can also mark a series of videos. This intro not only marks a spe­cific video, but can also mark a series of videos: It sets the mood for the upcom­ing style of the video, the series or entire series of events, even the per­son teach­ing it, offers recog­ni­tion and thus cre­ates a con­nec­tion to other units and the same “label”. This can encour­age the learner to stick with the course, but can also serve as a guide.

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Can edu­ca­tional videos really be cat­e­go­rized by dura­tion? With regard to the def­i­n­i­tions of dif­fer­ent for­mats: rather not …
Image by Sönke Hahn, released under CC BY 4.0

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Excursus: How long is too long? The length of teaching and learning videos

It should be noted that it makes lit­tle sense to define teach­ing and learn­ing videos solely by their dura­tion (Per­sike 2019: 10). As has prob­a­bly already been indi­cated, there are far too many vari­ants and mixed forms between dif­fer­ent for­mats and meth­ods, not to men­tion usage sit­u­a­tions. Nev­er­the­less, we would like to dis­cuss a com­mon “rule” regard­ing the length of videos: The so-called 6‑minute rule sug­gests that once the sixth minute begins, learn­ers’ atten­tion wanes or the video is less likely to be viewed fur­ther.

As with many rules of thumb, this should only be con­sid­ered in con­text. The rule itself applies above all in the con­text of MOOCs (Mas­sive Open Online Courses) (Johanes/Lagerstrom/Ponsukcharoen 2015: 15), i.e. large-scale events that reg­u­larly aim to or should address a cor­re­spond­ingly large audi­ence (Ebner/Schön 2017: 4; Per­sike 2019: 2). There has already been a “down­ward cor­rec­tion” in this respect: Thus, the orig­i­nal max­i­mum of 10 min­utes has become said 6 min­utes (Johanes/Lagerstrom/Ponsukcharoen 2015: 2). How­ever, a range of 1 to 20 min­utes can be found for edu­ca­tional and explana­tory videos (Harder n.d.: 103. and Ebner/Schön 2017: 3). And as we have seen, the for­mats within the over­all com­plex are defined as being “so and so” long here and dif­fer­ent there. How­ever, it can be help­ful to apply the six-minute rule to the sub­di­vi­sion(seg­men­ta­tion prin­ci­ple) of a video into con­tent units (Guo/Kim/Rubin 2014: 4) in order to pro­mote chunk­ing, i.e. the han­dling of infor­ma­tion by the learn­er’s brain.

Over­all, a dis­tinc­tion should be made on a case-by-case basis: A missed lec­ture is cer­tainly longer as a video than a crisp explana­tory video, as has already been indi­cated. And such a video, even if longer, is prob­a­bly bet­ter than hav­ing just missed the lec­ture. Sim­i­larly, the first part of this arti­cle on teach­ing and learn­ing videos already pointed out that form and con­tent are inex­tri­ca­bly linked. Con­se­quently, a longer video can also be suc­cess­ful because it may be able to hold the stu­dents’ inter­est or win it back again and again. Con­versely, not every sub­ject mat­ter can be pre­sented and/or con­densed in an infi­nitely attrac­tive way — this could be described as a “reduc­tion trap”, more on this in the third part of this series of arti­cles.

In addi­tion, and in line with con­struc­tivist learn­ing the­ory, the indi­vid­ual or the learn­ers them­selves must be taken into account ≈ each learner grad­u­ally cre­ates an indi­vid­ual, con­di­tion­ally con­scious con­struc­tion of an equally indi­vid­ual view of the world. Accord­ingly, learn­ing is also based on a foun­da­tion of sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ences, val­ues, beliefs, ori­en­ta­tions and pat­terns. There­fore, on the one hand, a kind of tar­get group analy­sis is use­ful on the part of the per­son pro­duc­ing the video in order to bet­ter reach learn­ers. On the other hand, inter­ests (in a video on the part of learn­ers) must always be under­stood in the con­text of the indi­vid­ual world view and such an inter­est as an indi­vid­ual achieve­ment.

The assump­tion that the length of a video is con­text-depen­dent can also be under­lined by a study from Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity: It con­cludes that the afore­men­tioned rule should not be taken too lit­er­ally, stu­dents def­i­nitely also watch longer videos (Johanes/Lagerstrom/Ponsukcharoen 2015: 15 f.). Impor­tantly, the study points out that videos [apart from any livestreams] are often (can be) viewed sev­eral times by learn­ers (Johanes/Lagerstrom/Ponsukcharoen 2015: 15 f.).

The over­all con­clu­sion is this: A video should be as short as pos­si­ble, but also as long as nec­es­sary.

+ 1 — Demonstration videos

Demon­stra­tion videos rarely stand alone, but are viewed in con­text. This can be of a non-mov­ing-media nature ≈ a click­able inter­view in the learn­ing man­age­ment sys­tem along­side any texts. Then demon­stra­tion videos can be used within other videos, namely explana­tory videos — as an inte­grated inter­view, for exam­ple. Char­ac­ter­is­tic of demon­stra­tion videos, when they stand on their own, is that they are with­out com­men­tary, have no nar­ra­tor text and their com­mu­nica­tive-didac­tic and aes­thetic pre­sen­ta­tion is lit­tle or not at all devel­oped — because they should not or do not have to stand for them­selves. They lack an autonomous “explana­tory char­ac­ter” (Per­sike 2019: 4).

Demon­stra­tion videos may well have been pro­duced for a spe­cific occa­sion — for exam­ple, to serve as illus­tra­tive mate­r­ial for exam­in­ing behav­iors in order to enable stu­dents to see the behav­iors dis­cussed. The term demon­stra­tion mate­r­ial can then be used to describe any mate­r­ial that is inte­grated into a teach­ing con­cept and, in turn, a teach­ing and learn­ing video, anal­o­gous to the inter­view in ques­tion. It can there­fore also be excerpts from other films, news pro­grams, etc. (Per­sike 2019: 4)

Film offers a spe­cial poten­tial in this respect — sim­i­lar to the inven­tion of microscopy: the micro­scope made the micro­cosm acces­si­ble or vis­i­ble. Of course, a film can depict events there in time or cap­ture them with the help of highly mag­ni­fy­ing lenses. In addi­tion, the mov­ing image can also make time “vis­i­ble”: time-lapse pho­tog­ra­phy can make changes vis­i­ble that reg­u­larly escape our atten­tion because they only hap­pen slowly. Con­versely, move­ments can be made vis­i­ble that we can­not grasp because they hap­pen too quickly for our per­cep­tion.

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As with ping-pong: the two sides of the coin are con­nected — in vari­able forms. We are now chang­ing our per­spec­tive and turn­ing our atten­tion to the sec­ond side of the field of teach­ing and learn­ing videos.
Image by Sönke Hahn, released under CC BY 4.0

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Page 2: Processes and means of production

This side of the coin in the field of teach­ing and learn­ing videos is — it should be empha­sized — not in con­tra­dic­tion to the first, but com­ple­ments the teach­ing and learn­ing video for­mats men­tioned there with a tech­ni­cal-eco­nomic view that cap­tures the real­iza­tion — visu­ally sim­i­lar to a ping-pong game. For the sake of clar­ity, the field of means of pro­duc­tion is divided into two areas: Tech­nol­ogy and process on the one hand and qual­ity of exe­cu­tion, cir­cum­stances of real­iza­tion on the other.

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The sec­ond page in the field of teach­ing and learn­ing videos in focus
Image by Sönke Hahn, released under CC BY 4.0

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Techniques

Live action footage or real footage

It should be men­tioned for the sake of com­plete­ness, because we have of course already talked about for­mats that are often enough asso­ci­ated with real images — such as the reportage or the report: Firstly and fun­da­men­tally, the pro­duc­tion of a film can be divided into real footage or live action footage on the one hand and ani­ma­tions or abstrac­tions etc. on the other. In the first case, a real cam­era is used to cap­ture an equally real world. In the sec­ond case, for exam­ple, vir­tual cam­eras can be used as part of 3D soft­ware. The move­ment over aspects shown on slides as part of a slide­cast, as an enlarge­ment or as a slide tran­si­tion, can be under­stood in a sim­i­lar way to a vir­tual cam­era.

The intro­duc­tory sub­junc­tive hints at this: In the wake of increas­ingly real­is­tic ani­ma­tions and com­puter-gen­er­ated images that are barely dis­tin­guish­able from real­ity, the dif­fer­ence between “ani­ma­tions here” and “real image there” is pri­mar­ily a the­o­ret­i­cal one. More­over, even with­out a Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tion bud­get, real footage in front of a green screen can be com­bined with vir­tual worlds or ani­ma­tions at home. Nev­er­the­less, the dis­tinc­tion is likely to have a last­ing effect in the pro­duc­tion of a video — because a real cam­era may or may not be required. How­ever, a film real­ized with lay­er­ing tech­nol­ogy can be cap­tured with a real cam­era on the one hand and be con­sid­ered ani­ma­tion on the other.

Screencasts/Slidecasts

Screen­casts are screen record­ings. They are par­tic­u­larly suit­able when it comes to shorter and instruc­tive teach­ing con­tent — soft­ware train­ing or instruc­tions. The pro­duc­tion method is asso­ci­ated with the term tuto­ri­als (for exam­ple: Harder n.d.: 103). The run­ning time of such tuto­ri­als is usu­ally less than 10 min­utes (Harder n.d.: 103), even though we have already seen that time should not be the mea­sure for clas­si­fy­ing teach­ing and learn­ing videos.

Slide­casts, on the other hand, are often purely visual record­ings of a pre­sen­ta­tion in the con­text of stan­dard pre­sen­ta­tion soft­ware, which may be accom­pa­nied and/or sup­ple­mented by speaker text. With­out a real cam­era, the pre­sen­ta­tion con­tent is recorded as a video.

Not only can videos be of this nature as a whole, such mate­r­ial can of course also be inte­grated into other videos: For exam­ple, the per­son speak­ing could be added pic­ture in pic­ture on the slides or switched back and forth between slides and the per­son speak­ing (in a var­ied man­ner) using a video edit­ing pro­gram. It is even pos­si­ble to intro­duce ani­ma­tions for tran­si­tions that can be described as sep­a­ra­tors (/stingers etc.), which give the change from slide to per­son a clear and struc­tured expres­sion. How­ever, no sta­tic image of the per­son giv­ing the lec­ture should “sim­ply” be placed per­ma­nently next to the slides — such a mea­sure can have a demon­stra­bly alien­at­ing effect (coher­ence prin­ci­ple).

The term micro-lec­ture is also based on a slide­cast (Harder n.d.: 103). Such videos should be a max­i­mum of eight min­utes long (Harder n.d.: 103). Not only the mico-lec­ture (Harder n.d.: 103), but also slide­casts in gen­eral are char­ac­ter­ized by the fact that they are rel­a­tively easy to real­ize. With the (often famil­iar) pre­sen­ta­tion soft­ware and micro­phones already installed in many com­put­ers, a result can be achieved quickly — a pre­sen­ta­tion can become a movie. At the same time, any ani­ma­tions that can be called up in the soft­ware can help to draw atten­tion to cer­tain aspects depicted on the slides used (Harder n.d.: 103) — pro­vided that these ani­ma­tions are used in mod­er­a­tion.

How­ever, both the qual­ity of the sound due to built-in micro­phones and the mov­ing media capa­bil­i­ties of pre­sen­ta­tion soft­ware must be clas­si­fied as lim­ited in view of the pos­si­ble demands of learn­ers. In addi­tion and in any case, the field of pre­sen­ta­tion slides must be clas­si­fied between effi­ciency and com­mu­nica­tive-didac­tic “pit­falls”: Slides often end up being too text-heavy (Karia 2015: 39 ff.) — not least due to an effort to achieve effi­ciency: post-use as a hand­out. At least in the case of slide­casts, a com­pro­mise should be found in this respect.

Laying technique / animations

The lay­ing tech­nique can be regarded as a tra­di­tional ani­ma­tion prin­ci­ple, as it can be used to cre­ate the impres­sion of move­ment or at least a con­text from indi­vid­ual images. Con­se­quently, the lay­ing tech­nique is also a way for peo­ple who are not tech­ni­cally or soft­ware-savvy to visu­al­ize facts: For exam­ple, cut-outs, printed or writ­ten texts etc. can be moved step by step and pho­tographed. Cut-outs, printed, writ­ten text, etc. could be moved and pho­tographed step by step to cre­ate an ani­ma­tion. This can be real­ized with com­mon smart­phones in high qual­ity — as a photo sequence.

Then the process of mov­ing could also be filmed (again via smart­phone) with­out inter­rup­tion. Or some­thing could even be painted, drawn or writ­ten in front of the video cam­era. In the case of a video record­ing, the per­son writ­ing can com­ment directly on what is shown so that no fur­ther edit­ing is nec­es­sary. (Where coor­di­na­tion and pre­sen­ta­tion qual­ity are likely to be a chal­lenge.) The real hands of the per­son pro­duc­ing the video are reg­u­larly vis­i­ble and prob­a­bly char­ac­ter­ize this process.

In addi­tion to pho­tog­ra­phy or film­ing, real hands from third par­ties or graphic hands (as part of a graphic tem­plate) can also be used in a sec­ond step dur­ing post-pro­cess­ing. Many soft­ware solu­tions offer ready-made hands (Aldrian 2019: 4 and 8) — but licens­ing issues must be checked in this regard. This applies all the more — with­out want­ing or being able to pro­vide legal advice — if the aim is to pub­lish the final videos beyond §60a UrhG (teach­ing and learn­ing) or if the mate­r­ial is released for oth­ers to use and edit in the sense of Open Edu­ca­tional Resources (OER). The extent to which (design) tem­plates and the graph­ics pro­vided by a soft­ware provider may be openly licensed and thus incor­po­rated into open for­mats, i.e. for­mats that can be used by other users, must be clar­i­fied in advance. Twillo offers ini­tial assis­tance with regard to legal aspects.

In addi­tion to ana­logue ani­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy, var­i­ous soft­ware solu­tions offer the pos­si­bil­ity of cre­at­ing dig­i­tal ani­ma­tions in 2D to 3D. Com­pared to the “jerky” and or delib­er­ately “hand­crafted” lay­ing tech­nique, these allow far more dynamic, flow­ing visu­al­iza­tions with a real­is­tic effect to be cre­ated. How­ever, they are often more costly and/or time-con­sum­ing to use. Soft­ware solu­tions that use graphic tem­plates to cre­ate an ani­ma­tion must be checked with regard to their license con­di­tions.

Interactive videos

On the one hand, inter­ac­tive videos are another form of pro­duc­tion; at the same time, they can be a vari­a­tion of the other types. In addi­tion to the recep­tion of an audio­vi­sual image and sound sequence, they offer the pos­si­bil­ity of inte­grat­ing a higher degree of activ­ity, namely inter­ac­tiv­ity. H5P con­tent can be inte­grated into many learn­ing man­age­ment sys­tems and web­site con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems using plug-ins, allow­ing videos to be enriched with quiz units and addi­tional infor­ma­tion. This allows the knowl­edge pre­sented in the instruc­tional video to be deep­ened and, if nec­es­sary, con­sol­i­dated (≈ activ­ity prin­ci­ple) — either within a teach­ing-learn­ing envi­ron­ment or even pub­licly on a web­site. Inter­ac­tive videos are also said to have the poten­tial to encour­age stu­dents to stick with a topic or, more specif­i­cally, a video (Aldrian 2019: 6).

How­ever, H5P edi­tors can also be used to add chap­ter mark­ers so that it is eas­ier to stick with the video as a whole if pas­sages are repet­i­tive or famil­iar to learn­ers. Such sec­tions can there­fore be skipped. Chap­ter mark­ers can also be set rel­a­tively eas­ily on many video plat­forms.

How­ever, the care­less place­ment of inter­ac­tive or inserted com­po­nents that go beyond chap­ter mark­ers in exist­ing mate­ri­als or videos can run the risk of hav­ing a con­fus­ing or dis­rup­tive effect on learn­ers — for exam­ple, because music is abruptly stopped by a quiz. Ide­ally, inter­ac­tiv­ity should be placed at points that make sense in terms of con­tent, for­mal design and didac­tic com­mu­ni­ca­tion: at the end of a chunk or topic block, at the end of a chap­ter, etc. If nec­es­sary, suit­able places can already be planned dur­ing the con­cep­tion and pro­duc­tion of a video. The music could fade out there to facil­i­tate the tran­si­tion to the quiz, etc. Con­versely, the use of the same video away from inter­ac­tive con­tent can be restricted.

Virtual realities: 360° videos and augmented reality

360° videos can be divided into fully spher­i­cal (360° x 360°) and semi-spher­i­cal films (360° x 180°, also known as Full­Dome — for hemi­spher­i­cal pro­jec­tion sites such as mod­ern plan­e­tar­i­ums or media domes). Com­puter-gen­er­ated, three-dimen­sional worlds can be cre­ated and viewed. It is also pos­si­ble to cap­ture real events in 360° (live action footage) in a sim­i­lar way to con­ven­tional cam­eras.

Until a few years ago, these films were cap­tured using extreme fish­eye lenses and/or by using mul­ti­ple cam­eras. The image sequences from sev­eral cam­eras were stitched together using soft­ware (≈ stitch­ing). Today, there are cor­re­spond­ing (action) cam­eras with wide-angle lenses and or mul­ti­ple lenses that can auto­mat­i­cally out­put fully or semi-spher­i­cal films.

These films can be viewed using glasses sys­tems ≈ vir­tual real­ity. Alter­na­tively, (pre­fab­ri­cated or self-made) card­board or sim­i­lar can be used as mounts for smart­phones to avoid the cost fac­tor of VR glasses. If nec­es­sary, these films can also be viewed “flat”, in the browser win­dow and by mouse.

360° videos offer the poten­tial to gain new per­spec­tives — such as those that can­not be achieved in real­ity due to dan­gers or for eco­nomic rea­sons. This pro­vides the oppor­tu­nity to immerse your­self in unknown, new, micro­scopic, etc. worlds. This pri­mar­ily refers to a real spa­tial, illu­sory immer­sion (in con­trast to a gen­eral immer­sion as immer­sion in the world of a book, for exam­ple ≈ Hahn (2018)). It is inter­est­ing to note that 360° videos par­tially turn their audi­ence into co-cre­ators; he/she/they them­selves choose the view of what is hap­pen­ing (Hahn 2013: 146), rather than hav­ing it com­pletely pre­de­ter­mined.

It is worth not­ing that, as is always the case, the appro­pri­ate­ness or use­ful­ness of a 360° video must be weighed up so that the use of such a video does not become coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. The actual oppor­tu­nity to look around freely is a major chal­lenge from a design per­spec­tive in order to con­vey facts in an under­stand­able way (Hahn 2013) — because there is no sin­gle focus area.

The terms aug­mented real­ity and mixed real­ity are used to describe the inter­weav­ing of real­ity and vir­tual worlds (Per­sike 2019: 8 f.). The expe­ri­ences made pos­si­ble by this go beyond the “usual” inter­weav­ing of the view­er’s space and what is hap­pen­ing on the screen as an immer­sive immer­sion in the actu­ally flat world of the screen, as a shared excite­ment with a story: In con­crete terms, this also refers to ini­tially invis­i­ble facts that sup­pos­edly become vis­i­ble by look­ing through the respec­tive devices, for exam­ple via glasses sys­tems or using the smart­phone cam­era and the screens there. The numer­ous sen­sors, the gyro­scopes, of smart­phones are used to locate vir­tual objects in the real world using apps, to place them in a “fixed” posi­tion — despite the devices being held in the hand.

The real­iza­tion of such projects is — as the com­po­nents men­tioned above show — still com­plex. In con­trast, 360° videos already have a con­sumer-ready level and cor­re­spond­ing work­flows as described.

For the sake of com­plete­ness, a semi-dig­i­tal ver­sion of aug­mented real­ity should also be men­tioned: for exam­ple, in the form of a video walk. Using only an iPod or sim­i­lar device and the acoustic and visual infor­ma­tion it makes pos­si­ble as still images, but on video, learn­ers can be guided through a real envi­ron­ment and expe­ri­ence dif­fer­ent times, worlds and sit­u­a­tions more or less super­im­posed on the actual space dur­ing the walk via head­phones and screen. An exam­ple of this is the “Alter Bahn­hof Video Walk” by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller for Doc­u­menta 13.

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In fact, there is a third side to the coin of teach­ing and learn­ing videos: Tech­niques and cir­cum­stances for real­iz­ing a video … a look behind the scenes, so to speak
Image by Sönke Hahn based on Sarah Brock­mann, released under CC 0 (1.0)

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Quality of execution, circumstances of realization

High production values: content pre-produced or streamed in the studio

The deci­sive cri­te­rion for this form of pro­duc­tion is the explicit con­cept for a video, a cor­re­spond­ing real­iza­tion and a pro­fes­sional level of pro­duc­tion. It is no coin­ci­dence that such edu­ca­tional videos are referred to as “block­busters” (Ebner/Schön 2017: 7), as they can basi­cally be staged in a sim­i­lar way to big Hol­ly­wood films and pre­pare con­tent in a cor­re­spond­ingly elab­o­rate way. How­ever, Hol­ly­wood has become more and more fea­si­ble “from home” in recent decades thanks to var­i­ous apps and auto­mated processes, although this is still not with­out effort, resources and skills.

High pro­duc­tion val­ues can be trans­ferred to any cin­e­matic mate­r­ial, with lit­tle over­lap in terms of the crafts­man­ship, tech­ni­cal and aes­thetic qual­ity of ani­ma­tions, live or pre-pro­duced real footage: while the lay­ing tech­nique may be a sim­ple process on the one hand, it can also be real­ized / asso­ci­ated with great effort for aes­thetic or didac­tic rea­sons: The man­ual, sim­ple charm of the lay­ing tech­nique could func­tion as a vis­i­ble abstrac­tion in order to achieve a new approach to the topic. If nec­es­sary, color-cor­rected images in a cer­tain look that under­lines the mood, which may vis­i­bly dif­fer­en­ti­ate between dif­fer­ent time lev­els treated in the film, and with ani­mated cross-fades in the form of call­outs with addi­tional infor­ma­tion, for exam­ple, enrich the mate­r­ial …

In order to achieve a high stan­dard, a pro­fes­sional cam­era or even sev­eral cam­eras, appro­pri­ate light­ing (e.g. three-point light) and an image mixer can be used; a back­ground sys­tem can be used so that any exist­ing pri­vate space (≈ home office) becomes invis­i­ble, and the cor­po­rate design of an insti­tu­tion can be used for a uni­form exter­nal image. Despite the effort involved, a teleprompter can make things eas­ier, so that the script can be read more eas­ily (even if it is trained and not too obvi­ous). At the same time, eye con­tact with the vir­tual audi­ence can be facil­i­tated (per­son­al­iza­tion prin­ci­ple).

If the live stream­ing is recorded or “only” pre-pro­duced, the effort and resource require­ments some­times dif­fer: If details of some­thing you want to show in the stu­dio are to be shown in the live stream, an auto­mated cam­era or a per­son oper­at­ing the cam­era or another cam­era con­trolled by an image mixer would be required: Zoom in on some­thing, a dif­fer­ent angle of some­thing on your desk. The recorded mate­r­ial of a live event can be sup­ple­mented with post-pro­duced mate­r­ial if the resources men­tioned are not avail­able, but the aim is to use the video in a time-sen­si­tive man­ner and make it avail­able on demand. In post-pro­duc­tion, other cam­era set­tings can then be added so that what is dis­cussed in the video file (didac­ti­cally use­ful) is more clearly vis­i­ble com­pared to the live stream. Mis­takes and lengths in the live lec­ture can now be removed. A purely pre-pro­duced video makes it pos­si­ble to cre­ate the impres­sion of a great deal of effort in the sense of non-lin­ear edit­ing with just one cam­era: dif­fer­ent set­tings can be selected one after the other and com­bined in the edit­ing pro­gram. Cau­tion: Although live stream­ing of a record­ing is pos­si­ble, the poten­tially inter­ac­tive com­po­nent, i.e. being able to respond to ques­tions live, is sac­ri­ficed.

Here are a few more tips on the use of green screens. Recording/streaming your­self or the speaker in front of a green screen allows you to inte­grate indi­vid­ual back­grounds — whether it’s just to hide the home office sit­u­a­tion or to avoid hav­ing to build a back­drop. Mate­ri­als that match the topic or, as men­tioned, a logo can be inte­grated as vir­tual back­grounds.

The use of a green screen can also make it pos­si­ble to com­bine the speaker with the slide­cast with­out a spe­cific frame. In this way, the quasi-cut-out sil­hou­ette can be vis­i­ble in par­al­lel with the slides or on the slides. Care should be taken to ensure that essen­tial con­tent is not cov­ered up. This pro­ce­dure is an alter­na­tive to a split-screen method, in which nei­ther the slides nor the speaker are dis­played to fill the for­mat. Chang­ing these set­tings can even be done “solo” using an image mixer.

(The func­tion of many pop­u­lar video con­fer­enc­ing soft­ware pack­ages proves to be a com­pro­mise in terms of pro­duc­tion effort: There, vir­tual back­grounds can be selected under effects. These back­grounds range from blur­ring the real back­ground to select­ing pre­fab­ri­cated back­grounds or back­grounds cre­ated by users. These mate­ri­als can then be designed in a rec­og­niz­able cor­po­rate design for the sake of con­sis­tency. Cau­tion: Although these processes do not require a green screen in the back­ground, the human being is rec­og­nized as such with soft­ware sup­port and vir­tu­ally cut out. How­ever, this cut­ting out has so far or often only been suc­cess­ful to a lim­ited extent. Ges­tures or objects in the hand can some­times also be fil­tered out — some­times to the detri­ment of the intended pre­sen­ta­tion).

Over­all, this brief list should have made it clear that, on the one hand, this is a com­plex under­tak­ing — tech­nol­ogy, soft­ware, num­ber of peo­ple involved. On the other hand, and as already men­tioned, at least some pro­fes­sion­al­ized com­pe­ten­cies or recourse to exter­nal forces may be nec­es­sary.

Filming — “Two to three birds with one stone”: Presence and/or live stream and/or archivable video file

We already touched on this approach when we looked at the first side of the coin in the field of teach­ing and learn­ing videos, with regard to authors and their inten­tions: It is undoubt­edly prac­ti­cal to gen­er­ate mate­r­ial that can be used in the long term by film­ing a face-to-face event. As a form of hybrid teach­ing (under­stood here as a spa­tial hybrid, pres­ence and vir­tual, with an iden­ti­cal teach­ing sit­u­a­tion ≈ live), an audi­ence on site as well as a con­nected audi­ence can be reached via stream.

Cer­tainly in the con­text of the pan­demic, one could add “bet­ter this way than not at all”. How­ever, we have already seen above that there are stum­bling blocks here: The event pos­si­bly cap­tured from the back of the room with a sin­gle cam­era may lose its impact on the video, slides are not ide­ally leg­i­ble. Basi­cally, there are dif­fer­ent media. So if there is a com­pre­hen­si­ble, effi­cient inten­tion to kill two (with live/hybrid: three) birds with one stone, then a higher tech­ni­cal and time expen­di­ture is rec­om­mended. On the one hand, this can pro­mote learn­ing through bet­ter read­abil­ity and acces­si­bil­ity. On the other hand, the effect of a teach­ing and learn­ing video can be enhanced in terms of aes­thetic added value and grow­ing expec­ta­tions on the part of the audi­ence (we will come back to this in the third part of this blog series). Specif­i­cally, this means the use of two to three cam­eras and/or cam­eras with auto tracking/panning/zoom func­tions that can be con­trolled by ges­ture. At the same time, pro­jected slides should also be offered to the vir­tual audi­ence as split-screen con­tent via video con­fer­enc­ing soft­ware. It may be nec­es­sary to edit the mate­r­ial after­wards or use live image mix­ers, feed in wire­less micro­phones etc. in order to do jus­tice to the “other” medium (≈ recep­tion sit­u­a­tion).

Outsourcing between facilitation for teachers and competence gain for learners

The pro­duc­tion of any videos can be out­sourced — agen­cies can pro­vide sup­port here, where pos­si­ble didac­tic cen­ters (at a uni­ver­sity) can help or the tasks can be handed over to stu­dent assis­tants or stu­dents. In the lat­ter case, there is the didac­tic poten­tial to real­ize learn­ing-through-teach­ing by means of video pro­duc­tion (Ebner/Schön 2017: 4; Per­sike 2019: 22). This means that the pro­duc­tion of videos can be assigned to stu­dents as a task — as project work, for exam­ple. On the one hand, stu­dents ded­i­cate them­selves to a spe­cific topic and con­vey some­thing to their fel­low stu­dents. On the other hand, they can hone their media skills, specif­i­cally in rela­tion to film, as part of the side course.

How­ever, when assign­ing the video pro­duc­tion to stu­dents, both to assis­tants and to course par­tic­i­pants, the ease for teach­ers varies: Stu­dents par­tic­i­pat­ing in the course may need to be sup­ported in terms of design, tech­ni­cal and soft­ware skills. In the case of stu­dent assis­tants, in addi­tion to the rel­e­vant qual­i­fi­ca­tions, con­sid­er­a­tion must be given to whether soft­ware and tech­nol­ogy is avail­able to the assis­tants in a suit­able form or whether it can be pro­vided.

Conclusion

We have related var­i­ous for­mats of teach­ing and learn­ing videos to equally diverse, not least tech­ni­cal and eco­nomic processes. This has resulted in a field of ten­sion of pos­si­bil­i­ties. Inten­tions and tech­niques can be com­bined. The spec­trum of pos­si­ble uses for teach­ing and learn­ing videos, as well as the sit­u­a­tions and cir­cum­stances in which they can be used, is so wide that it is not pos­si­ble to define teach­ing and learn­ing videos, and per­haps they should not exist. Such pigeon­hol­ing would ulti­mately obscure the poten­tial to address spe­cific top­ics and con­cerns via video — through a com­bi­na­tion.

How­ever, this sec­ond part should have indi­cated that although teach­ers can draw on an equally wide range of pos­si­bil­i­ties, they should reflect on didac­tic-com­mu­nica­tive con­sid­er­a­tions, bud­get and time issues, their own and the learn­ers’ skills at an early stage. There­fore, in the next part, we will take a detailed and sum­ma­riz­ing look at the com­mu­nica­tive-didac­tic poten­tial of teach­ing and learn­ing videos. We will also take a crit­i­cal look at the use of edu­ca­tional videos. The next arti­cle will be pub­lished on May 28, 2022.

If you missed the first part or would like to con­tinue with the third part of our series on teach­ing and learn­ing videos:

• Part I: Char­ac­ter­is­tics and didac­tics of instruc­tional videos
• Part III: Poten­tial and crit­i­cism

You are also wel­come to access the col­lec­tion directly on twillo to go into medias res — includ­ing hand­outs with back­ground infor­ma­tion and tem­plates.

About the authors

Franziska Bock, M. A. and Dr. Sönke Hahn are research asso­ciates of the project “OER-Por­tal Nieder­sach­sen”: twillo — Lehre teilen. Bock is active in the field of uni­ver­sity didac­tics and deals with ques­tions of writ­ing didac­tics and the con­cep­tion of reusable teach­ing and learn­ing mate­ri­als. Hahn is an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary sci­en­tist, film­maker with inter­na­tional per­for­mances and mul­ti­ple award-win­ning designer. As part of the Emden/Leer Uni­ver­sity of Applied Sci­ences, Bock and Hahn see it as their mis­sion to go beyond good con­tent to advance teach­ing as such.

References

Aldrian, S. (2019): Teach­ing video. Cen­ter for Uni­ver­sity Didac­tics. Uni­ver­sity of Applied Sci­ences of Busi­ness, Graz. URL: https://www.campus02.at/hochschuldidaktik/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2019/09/Lehrvideo.pdf (retrieved on 15.03.2022).

Ebner, M. / Schön, (2017): Learn­ing and teach­ing videos: Design, pro­duc­tion, use. E‑learning hand­book. 71st sup­ple­ment (Octo­ber 2017). 4.61. S. 1–14.

Guo, P. J. / Kim, J. / Rubin, R (2014): “How video pro­duc­tion affects stu­dent engage­ment: An empir­i­cal study of MOOC videos” In: L@S 2014, March 4–5, 2014, Atlanta, Geor­gia, USA.

Hahn, S. (2013): “Full­dome vs 16:9. On the dif­fer­ences in the con­cep­tion, design and pro­duc­tion of a fea­ture film in the dome and in the clas­sic pic­ture for­mat using the exam­ple of the film ver­sions of break­FAST” In: Insti­tut für immer­sive Medien der FH Kiel (ed.): Jahrbuch immer­siver Medien 2013. Schüren: Kiel/Marburg, 133–147.

Hahn, S. (2018): The six­fold nature of immer­sion: an attempt to (dis­cur­sively) define a multi-lay­ered con­cept URL: https://www.academia.edu/35937976/Die_Sechsfalt_der_Immersion_Versuch_der_diskursiven_Definition_eines_vielschichtigen_Konzepts (15.03.2022).

Harder, S. (n.d.): Teach­ing videos. Pos­si­ble uses in part-time stud­ies. URL: https://www.uni-rostock.de/storages/uni-rostock/UniHome/Weiterbildung/KOSMOS/Lehrvideos.pdf (retrieved on 15.03.2022).

Johanes, P / Lager­strom, L. / Pon­sukcharoen, U. (2015): “The Myth of the Six-Minute Rule: Stu­dent Engage­ment with Online Videos” In: 2015 ASEE Annual Con­fer­ence & Expo­si­tion.

Kamp, W. (2017): AV media design. Europa Lehrmit­tel: Haan-Gruiten.

Karia, Akash (2015): How to design ted wor­thy pre­sen­ta­tion slides. Akash Karia, op. cit.

Merkt, M. / Schwan, S. (2018): “Learn­ing with mov­ing images: Videos and ani­ma­tions” In: Niege­mann, H. / Wein­berger, A. (eds.): Learn­ing with edu­ca­tional tech­nolo­gies.

Per­sike, M. (2019): “Videos in teach­ing: effects and side effects” In: Niege­mann, H. & Wein­berger, A. (eds.): Learn­ing with edu­ca­tional tech­nolo­gies. Springer: Ger­many.

Rosen­baum, L. (2018): “Youtube — Devel­op­ing edu­ca­tional videos into an inter­ac­tive learn­ing expe­ri­ence” In: Blog E‑Learning Zen­trum Hochschule für Wis­senschaft und Recht Berlin. URL: https://blog.hwr-berlin.de/elerner/youtube-lernvideos-zu-einem-interaktiven-lernerlebnis-weiterentwickeln/ (accessed on 15.03.2022).

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This arti­cle by Franziska Bock and Sönke Hahn is licensed under CC BY 4.0 unless oth­er­wise stated in indi­vid­ual con­tent.

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