All posts by Dee Schmidgall

Getting Ready For Your Close-Up: Video Tips for Faculty

Making a video that will meet your objectives is not an easy task, but there are some simple guidelines to increase your odds of success. I’ve used this space before to describe the challenges I’ve encountered creating online course videos that are actually engaging to view, so it’s fair to ask why I keep returning to this subject, and why I harp so much on faculty preparation.

Here’s why. In my experience lack of preparation on the part of the on-camera talent (faculty, subject-matter experts, etc.) is the greatest obstacle to a successful video production. It’s an easily preventable waste of everyone’s time and efforts.

And it can be a substantial waste. Unless you’re making a quick webcam video introduction that will run at the start of the course and be replaced the next term, producing video is a resource-intensive undertaking. There are meetings to set goals and gather requirements, scripts that must be written and revised, production personnel and studios to be scheduled, props and digital assets to be assembled, editing and compositing in post-production; all before you get something to review and ultimately publish. Unless you have unlimited resources (and who does?) it’s imperative that the end product meets its purpose, whether it’s to add some social presence or help realize a learning objective. And you can be sure that its purpose won’t be met if it’s unwatchable.

So here are some preparation tips for successful video:

  1. Determine your objective. Working with your instructional designer (if you are lucky enough to have one), ask yourself what’s the purpose of the video. Do you want to introduce yourself and the course to your students? Or is there a process or procedure you want to demonstrate? Why use a video rather than text, a podcast, or narrated PowerPoint?
  2. Write an appropriate script. Some people are naturals on-camera and can speak smoothly without a script. However, most faculty will need a script and a teleprompter unless they’re participating in an interview session. Here let’s reiterate that writing for media is a much different skill than writing for academia. Remember that you will be speaking what you write; your students won’t be reading it. You want to write more for the ear than for the eye. There are many books on this topic; Robert L. Hilliard’s Writing for Television and Radio is an often-cited text and available through the DePaul library.
  3. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. The day of the shoot is not the time to give your script a first read-through. Reading aloud through your script will quickly make evident if you’ve included difficult phrases or cumbersome words that make a smooth delivery difficult or impossible. Rewrite the rough spots, and then practice with a friend, spouse, your handy instructional designer, or even alone in front of a mirror. But do it. Repeatedly.
  4. Dress professionally and simply.I suggest opting for a solid color suit for both men and women. If you find yourself addressing a clinical matter as a scientist or physician, feel free to wear a lab coat. For a more casual look, a solid shirt, blouse, or sweater would be suitable as well. It’s advisable to avoid patterns and flashy jewelry. Additionally, if you happen to be in front of a green screen, it’s crucial not to wear anything with green in it. Oh, and when it comes to the attire, remember to wear dress just like one of these hot pink prom dresses. See these guidelines here.
  5. Wear makeup on camera. Both men and women can use a little help with shiny foreheads and dark circles under the eyes. You don’t want to look haggard or washed-out on-screen; you can find some makeup tips here.

Making a successful video isn’t exactly rocket science, but it does require some basic preparation. So follow these simple tips and you’ll increase the chances of getting results your students will watch and you’ll be proud of.

Follow Up: Creating Engaging Online Video

Last fall, I wrote about the challenges of creating engaging video for online courses. Disappointed with the end product I was getting by serving in a mostly advisory capacity, I declared that I would take a more hands-on approach. I was hopeful that by requiring early ideation sessions, script review, rehearsal, and on-site art direction I’d be able to get results that would meet faculty goals and that students would actually watch.

I’m still waiting for that happy day to arrive. I hadn’t anticipated that it would be so difficult to get stakeholders to deliver a draft of a script on deadline, let alone to find time for substantive review and iteration. Rehearsals? I haven’t been able to schedule one yet. As far as art direction, I’ve bumped up against the realities of working with media services that have limited abilities and capacities; without the resources to do extensive compositing and editing in post-production, there’s very little you can do with a static one-camera set up.

Still, the status quo is hard to defend. In the absence of sufficient preproduction planning and active involvement during the shoot, too often what’s created is a hard-to-watch presentation consisting of a speaker at a podium superimposed over hard-to-read PowerPoint slides. The effectiveness of this presentation approach in a live classroom is debatable, but it’s rarely successful online.

Even better-conceived productions suffer from lack of adequate planning and constraints. Rushed into production at the last minute, a recent shoot with two engaging professors discussing a topic dear to them failed because it was too long to sustain interest and relied too heavily on post-production that our campus media services were unable to deliver on deadline.

I’m still hopeful that a more hands-on approach will ultimately be successful. Building in lots more time for preproduction should help, and my department is taking steps to bring more production in-house for greater control of outcomes. I’m also hoping to find a way for our faculty to work with DePaul’s television studio and personnel; the ability to create multicamera interview productions would give us a powerful way to deliver engaging, high-quality online video.

Designing Across Nine Time Zones: Twiddla to the Rescue!

Sometimes you need a no-cost way to work collaboratively and synchronously at a distance. For instance, earlier this year I was a member of a graduate-student team designing an interactive app for the iPad. We had a member in Saudi Arabia, another on the eastern seaboard, and several members spread across the Chicago metro area. We obviously couldn’t meet in person to sketch out ideas and critique them. We needed a way to post design documents, mark them up, and discuss in real time. Fortunately for us, we discovered Twiddla, a collaborative workspace with a free version that proved indispensible.

Getting Started

Twiddla describes itself as a real-time collaboration tool. I liked that it was simple and easy to use; just navigate to http://twiddla.com and click Start a New Meeting:

Twiddla gives you a clean, easy-to-use interface. The toolbar has controls for a virtual whiteboard, tools for adding and annotating documents, images, and web pages, and a real-time collaborative text editor that Twiddla calls an EtherPad. There’s a basic text tool for annotating the display and simple drawing and shapes tools too. Twiddla also offers some fundamental tools to edit and arrange items and a basic administrative tool that allows you to add users and edit your profile.

Once you’re in your meeting room you can edit your profile, invite other users, and load your images, documents, Web pages, or media.

Add and Mark Up Documents

My team needed to be able to see, discuss, and mark up each other’s sketches in real time. Here’s an example of a PDF uploaded to Twiddla and marked up with the drawing tool:

This ability to view and mark up sketches was invaluable to my team, allowing us to review, critique, and iterate in real time, despite being separated by thousands of miles. Twiddla now has a real-time voice tool, but we opted to use Skype for synchronous voice and created a no-cost, real-time collaborative workspace with a combination of ease-of-use and powerful visual tools I haven’t found elsewhere.

While I consider Twiddla far easier to use, more powerful, and better for my purposes than wikis, Google Docs, or Web-conferencing tools like Wimba, it also has extended functionalities like the ability to insert math formulas or upload widgets and code that make it a great collaborative tool for math, science, multimedia, or programming:

Is It Right for You?

There are of course some limitations to the free version. You don’t have a named user account, so you can’t set up a workspace far in advance and send out invitations later. You can’t hold simultaneous meetings, and you’re on your own for tech support. You also can’t archive or save your work for future use, and you can’t have a password-protected private meeting, which might preclude using Twiddla with students in some situations. Paid versions eliminate those shortcomings and add features like unlimited storage, SSL security, custom URLs, and presenter/moderator controls for as little as $14 a month.

However, the free version works really well for me. So if you’re looking for a powerful, no-cost, easy-to-use collaborative workspace, Twiddla deserves your attention. Check it out at http://twiddla.com.

Happy Holidays!

Are Instructors Ready for Show Time?

Attend any conference on distance learning and you’ll hear lots of enthusiasm for instructor videos in online courses. Whether they’re DIY webcam course introductions or sophisticated in-studio productions, the general belief is that more video equals a better course. I’ve long been an advocate for increasing the use of instructor video, but lately I’ve come to the conclusion that not every instructor is ready for show time.

Why? Mostly it’s because the qualities that make for a good video require skills and attributes that aren’t necessarily found in all, or even most, faculty. Engaging images and narrative aren’t usually what’s presented in a classroom PowerPoint. Brevity is a must, but many academics lecture even when coached not to. Ease and comfort on camera are essential, but I’ve seen too many recordings that feature white-knuckled instructors gripping a podium and staring blankly into the middle-distance.

This isn’t the fault of the instructor. Writing for media and performing for video are specialized skills not part of the typical Ph.D. program. And I’ve been guilty of handing faculty a couple of video production guideline documents, offering some generalized tips, and then being disappointed when the results are less than desired.

No more. I’ve decided that I need to be involved every step of the production process, from ideation to script review to preproduction rehearsal and on-site coaching and art direction. It will be a much longer and labor-intensive process, but I think it’s absolutely necessary to get results that everyone can be proud of.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that some faculty just aren’t able to appear on camera in a way that adds value to their course. While unfortunate, it’s a fact that a stiff, sweaty delivery by a visibly uncomfortable professor leaves a poor impression of his or her abilities as a teacher and, by extension, the program or school. For them there are other ways to add social presence. I’ve worked with faculty who are clearly unsuited for video but who produce really engaging audio podcasts. It would be irresponsible for me to insist on video when using audio gives a much better result.

So are instructors ready for show time? A few are, some others can be made ready, and some will never be. The challenge is to identify which media best suits an individual faculty member, diplomatically guide them to that media, and then follow through with lots of hands-on direction and oversight.

D2L Migration: A Look Back

Last September, I reported on the Blackboard to Desire2Learn migration at SNL Online, as we moved from our initial planning and design phases to full production and review modes. I promised then I’d keep you posted; I had no idea how all-consuming the migration would prove to be.  Changing requirements, mission creep, and faculty training kept us continually challenged; here’s a look back at each:

Changing Requirements

We developed a course template through an iterative process that included a couple of rounds of user testing with faculty and students. Though we did extensive requirements gathering before developing our prototypes, because of extremely tight time constraints we did so based on our test instantiation of D2L. Platform strengths and shortcomings became known as the actual D2L production environment was installed, and we found ourselves in a long cycle of review and redesign. These redesigns came while our course migration was well underway, which resulted in having to rebuild courses already converted in a meticulous, labor-intensive process. Much of this was likely unavoidable, given we were gathering requirements and developing templates while our IT department struggled to integrate an unfamiliar and untested platform. More time to research, design, test, and iterate on a stable installation in advance of the actual migration would have prevented a lot of headaches.

Mission Creep

We designed our migration procedure to include a course-author review process; authors would review their converted course to ensure accuracy and in doing so would become oriented to D2L.  However, what had been envisioned as essentially a proofreading exercise quickly morphed into rounds of actual course revisions, which exponentially increased the workload. The courses were better for it, but once again more time to plan and allow for contingencies like this would’ve been helpful.

Faculty Training

The paradox of D2L is that the very features that are so empowering for some faculty are confusing and intimidating for others.  FITS devoted enormous amounts of manpower to create extensive documentation and video tutorials for faculty university-wide, but because of the unique nature of the SNL Online template and program we had to have specialized materials and training for our faculty. Changing user and system requirements complicated this process, and my team is still developing training materials as new needs and problems are identified.

The Rollout

Though there were problems both avoidable and unanticipated, the initial rollout of D2L in January was remarkably trouble free. Our user testing gave us a template that leveraged D2L’s strengths and that students found easy to use. Faculty unfamiliarity with the platform and its tools—despite generous training and support resources—required far more attention than student difficulties.
Overall the migration was a tremendous success.

Some problems remain. Certain D2L tools still don’t work properly in our environment; intelligent agents don’t work at all. However, the folks at D2L are dedicated and responsive, and I’m hopeful that these issues will be resolved.

We plan to do a follow-up study to determine how our design can be improved and another to test whether students do better academically with one design versus another. There’s some debate in my department on whether usability and pedagogy are sometimes incompatible; I’d love to see the results of a study addressing that concern.

In a future post I’ll look at lessons learned and what I might do differently given similar circumstances.

Notes from the Field: Migration to Desire2Learn

Back in June, in “Resistance Is Futile: Embracing an LMS Migration,” I wrote about the challenges of SNL Online’s migration of about eighty fully online courses to Desire2Learn. I’d like to revisit some of the key discoveries and thoughts.

Time Is Not on Your Side

How much time do you think you’ll need to implement the learning management system, get all the stakeholders on board and trained, and successfully migrate your courses? Double that. Then double it again. You’ll thank me later.

It Won’t Happen That Way

As mentioned before, the migration tool that was supposed to make transferring courses from Blackboard to Desire2Learn easy didn’t work as advertised, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s sat through any vendor demo and then worked with an actual instantiation of the product. What was billed as a relatively seamless and problem-free process has been anything but, with a difficult and ongoing integration process with PeopleSoft making our production timelines irrelevant. Key tools, roles, and functionalities we’d relied on having either aren’t yet available or never will be, putting our design specs constantly in flux and making our production workflow reactive and inefficient. It’s certainly not the end of the world, but even our conservative estimates of production time and costs have proven overly optimistic in light of the D2L/PeopleSoft integration difficulties.

Did I Mention You’ll Need More Time?

We have a lot of talented people working really hard to make sure everything works as it should and ensure that this migration is a success for students and faculty. And they’re discovering on roughly a weekly basis that things we thought would work don’t. They need more time to test everything, and so will you.

An Ounce of Prevention

Our course design specs are the result of an iterative process that included a couple of rounds of user tests with students and faculty. As a result I’m able to rely upon real data when I work with faculty to explain our new design and protocols. I’m pleased to say that most seem to understand and appreciate what we’ve done and why. Some don’t though, and a disproportionate amount of time and energy is expended trying to sell them something that has already been made departmental policy. You might avoid this uncomfortable situation by bringing stakeholders to the table at the beginning of the migration planning. Of course, that will likely delay things, which will require yet more time.

Pain Is Growth

It’s really easy to get caught up in the stress of things and lose sight of the goal and its rewards. Disruptive and maddeningly frustrating as much of this process has been, we should ultimately have a much better learning environment for students and faculty. I’m learning I can juggle more cats than I’d imagined, and I marvel at the talent of my co-workers and the grace they show under pressure. Because of their dedication we’ll have a shiny new LMS ready to roll out in January. I’ll keep you posted.

Resistance is Futile: Embracing an LMS Migration

SNL Online is in full mobilization mode preparing for the migration of eighty-eight online courses from Blackboard to Desire2Learn. A lot of experienced, well-educated, and well-intentioned folks have argued for a university-wide switch, and so we will have it.

Like all real change, the migration is and will continue to be disruptive; old ways of producing, teaching, and taking online courses will necessarily be uprooted and swept away with new theories and practices. Already there have been revelations and lessons learned; here are a few thoughts:

Hope for the best; plan for the worst.

D2L has a migration tool that was pitched as a magic bullet that would make moving over course content a breeze. That’s likely true for certain kinds of course configurations under certain conditions. Your results may vary. Ours certainly did: our requirements for course structure and design make the migration tool essentially useless, and migration will take more time and resources than anyone had imagined.

The demo is not what you’ll get.

Know how automotive writers always insist you drive the exact make, model, and trim level you intend to buy? On the roads you normally drive? The same principle holds true with your new LMS. We’re discovering to our dismay that some of the key features we’d planned on using in our new course designs don’t work when D2L is integrated with other systems—PeopleSoft in our case. The IS boys and girls at our university strongly suggested this might be the case, and so far they’ve been right. Not the end of the world, but definitely a buzz-kill.

Test. And test again.

This certainly applies to the LMS and its features as a whole (see above), but here I’m thinking about our actual course template, or master design. What was argued for in design-planning meetings as being best for users turned out to be unwanted, disregarded, or disliked by actual users in actual user tests. We took the results, revamped our designs, and will run more user tests. User tests aren’t infallible, but they help us make informed decisions and, we hope, better user experiences.

Get everybody on board.

Migrating from one LMS to another is a huge, complex endeavor. We realized early on that a successful migration was going to be more than just our instructional-design team could handle; course authors had to be consulted, faculty needed to be trained, student workers hired and trained, roles and permissions within the LMS defined and assigned, tasks identified, processes created and tracked—and all this in addition to the actual design and reconfiguration of courses.

Our school’s operations team excels at project management and planning, so our design group met with them to map out the project and set up systems to implement, record, and track our process and progress. Seeing all our tasks written on sticky notes and posted to the wall was intimidating at first, but it gave us a realistic look at the challenge we faced and a means of organizing, prioritizing, and delegating. While the project is still enormous, we now have a plan and structure in place that will help us succeed.

Remember to breathe.

While certainly daunting when looked at as a whole, the project is really a set of discrete tasks, most of which can be broken down into still smaller tasks. If I remember that, and take some deep breaths every now and then, there’s actually a certain amount of fun involved. Then migrating to a new LMS becomes just a complex puzzle to be solved, and I can concentrate on finding and fitting the appropriate pieces. Stay tuned.

Wiki Spring-Cleaning Tips

Having recently done some cleaning and maintenance on several wikis to ready them for the spring quarter, I thought I’d pass on what I’ve learned. Bear in mind these thoughts represent what I’ve learned building and administering premium workspaces in PBworks; other wikis may have different features and protocols.

Make sure you need a wiki. This is first in my list because sometimes (and I’m guilty here) wikis are added to a course without a compelling reason to use them. Do you have a real need for a collaborative workspace for your students? Do they need to be able to share and edit documents, images, files, and the like? Great: a wiki is just what you need. Do you want to use one because it seems like it’d be a handy way for students to submit media-rich documents? If you’re using Blackboard or another leading LMS, don’t bother with a wiki. Use the features built into your LMS; you’ll have fewer headaches and your students will be much happier.

Assume nothing. Really, just don’t. I should know better, but each term I’m surprised that some of our users are stumped when it comes to using a wiki. My online program has fewer issues with faculty use and administration since we made it policy that all faculty teaching a course that includes a wiki must show competence with the tool, but there’s still confusion among faculty and students alike about access, permissions, logins, password resets, editing, and the like that must be addressed each term. Oh, and don’t assume that every request for access to the workspace is from an enrolled student. Or that everyone you give access to the wiki will stay enrolled. You need to monitor users and their status throughout the term.

Communication is key. I can’t stress this enough. Faculty need to know their responsibilities (like adding users) and how to carry them out. Students need to be told early on how to access and log in to the wiki if it’s external to the LMS (like PBworks). They also must be made aware of whatever level of access other students will have to their work; this is a real privacy issue that can’t be overlooked. And students need to have their own responsibilities spelled out, with clear directions how to fulfill them. The wiki isn’t an add-on to the course; it should be an integrated component with its use and policies included in the syllabus. Finally, if you’re administering wikis for multiple courses (like I am), and you don’t create a new wiki for each term, you’ll need to contact faculty well before the start of the upcoming term to let them know the wiki has to be reverted to its original state for reuse and to determine who will be responsible for doing so.

Wikis can be a valuable part of an online course, but they need more care and feeding than other components, especially if they’re external to the LMS. If you make sure you’re using your wiki appropriately, don’t make assumptions about your users (or your design), and communicate objectives and responsibilities with all stakeholders, you’ll create a less stressful and more productive online learning environment.

Poor Usability or Just Poor Users? The Squeaky-Wheel Syndrome

A week or two ago, I sat in a meeting where we attempted to weigh the intelligence of our faculty and students. Oh, we were too polite to call it that exactly; ostensibly at least, we were discussing how we could make our wikis more user-friendly. The discussion covered a range of possible cures for the perceived disease, from more intensive faculty training to student scaffolding to more and better tutorials. All well and good, this desire to make things easier for our end users. As a fairly recent convert to Usability, I embrace its tenets and evangelize for its centrality in our design process. Still, I wonder if things are really so difficult for our users, and if so, for whom and how many? Are we looking at a usability issue or a user issue? Are we simply reacting to the squeakiest wheel?

We use PBworks for collaborative work spaces in select online courses at SNL Online. Most have been used successfully, and most difficulties can usually be traced to unfamiliarity with the user interface: difficulties that are generally addressed and resolved with PBworks’ video tutorials and the task-specific tutorials we produce in-house. However, some students and faculty struggle mightily with the same interface, and the same support materials do little to alleviate their distress. Why is this, and what should be done about it?

Now, I will grant you that users differ in their facility with tools. And I will further grant you that we designers sometimes fail to make things as clear as they might be.

However. When the only appreciable difference between successful and unsuccessful engagement with a technology is the user set, I feel we have to examine whether we’re responding to a real usability issue, one that is intrinsic to the design of the technology and its interface, or to a problem of poor users.

I fear too often it’s the latter. Lacking any data on our users, we respond to the complaints of a few and extrapolate their difficulties to the general population. If a faculty member or student complains about their problems using a tool, we immediately jump to the conclusion that the tool is defective and devote hours of support and development time creating resources to ameliorate the perceived deficiencies, resources that we assume are better than those already produced by the makers of the technology. All this effort is expended to solve the problems of a small set of users who will never be made comfortable with a new technology by any level of support. Further, all of this activity occurs in the absence of any data indicating real need or a cost-benefit analysis.

I’m not sure what the solution to this might be. My department doesn’t have the resources to conduct extensive user testing for each technology we might introduce. However, we also don’t have limitless resources to chase the ephemeral perfect tutorial or provide one-on-one student and faculty support. Perhaps we have to admit we can’t help everyone, every time. Perhaps, once in a while, the squeaky wheel must go ungreased.

CAEL 2009: What about Online?

A couple of weeks ago, I was a presenter at the CAEL 2009 International Conference. CAEL (The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning) is by definition broadly interested in assessing and serving adult learners in a variety of programs; nevertheless, I was struck by how few workshops offered anything geared toward online learning.

This isn’t a small matter. Each keynote speaker I heard addressed the importance of serving the underserved, of finding ways to identify, assess, and recruit adult populations who would benefit from increased access to adult and/or continuing education. There’s tremendous opportunity for institutional growth, they declared, and there’s a moral obligation and societal responsibility to do so. However, most presenters were thinking of these efforts as they pertain to on-ground, classroom-based models. Online learning–if mentioned at all–seemed to be regarded as an add-on option of dubious value to traditional academic delivery.

This kind of perspective has to change if there’s any hope of bringing significantly more adults into our community of learners. Do those who sit on marketing and enrollment committees really want to exclude everyone who might benefit from and contribute to a university learning community but for their inability to be physically present in a traditional classroom? Wouldn’t it be better to design and build a scalable online program that could reach and serve adults regardless of their geographic location? Wouldn’t it be better to spend marketing dollars to identify and attract adult learners to an online program, adults who because of family, work, or other obligations will never step foot in another traditional classroom but who could and would take courses online if given the opportunity? Social media marketing is also a highly cost-effective way to expand your reach. You can visit this website to increase your chances of attracting organic engagement. 

I hear all the time that we must not cannibalize our on-ground programs, as if access to education were a kind of zero-sum game. News flash: a single parent facing a long after-work commute in rush-hour traffic to attend even a suburban-campus night class will almost never occupy a seat in your classroom unless he or she has exceptional resolve and resources. That same person could and would complete a degree online if it’s made available, attractive, and affordable.  My evidence of this is anecdotal, but I’m convinced it would be affirmed by some targeted marketing research. Of course, that would take institutional vision and commitment. And a change of perspective, looking out and away from the classroom to where new opportunity awaits.