In higher education, we are currently facing a dual crisis in content creation (a tri-crisis if you count AI content creation, but that’s for another day!). On one side, we have the so-called “Zoom Fatigue”—the exhaustion students feel from sitting in endless hours of talking heads in video calls. On the other side, we have “Death by PowerPoint”—the instinct for instructors to put every single spoken word onto a slide, forcing students to split their attention between reading and listening, and worse, doing that in one to two hour long (or longer!) recordings.

For faculty developing asynchronous online courses, this creates a significant tension. We know that instructor presence is vital; students want to see and hear their professor to feel connected. However, being the primary visual focus for a quarter’s worth of video is daunting for the instructor and often monotonous for the viewer.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Recently, the Academic Media Production (AMP) team partnered with two different faculty members to create a solution: a “mini-documentary” production style for content lectures. It removes the slide deck entirely, brings the instructor’s personality, presence, and expertise into the course. Here is how this “mini-documentary” approach looked in two very different disciplines.

Case Study 1: English –”Literature and Film: Frankenstein Lives On; or Help, the Monster is Coming!”

The Goal: The instructor explores the evolution of Frankenstein’s monster through history, looking at everything from literature and film, to pop culture and real world scientific research. She wanted to create an immersive narrative but was uncomfortable being the on-screen “main character” for the entire term, choosing instead to only appear in her introduction.

The Execution: She recorded her lectures in our on campus studio as scripted monologues—storytelling, rather than teaching. In post-production, our editor built a visual world that matched her narrative. Because the topic included many visual references from film and pop culture, the visuals were eclectic and vibrant. The screen was filled, not with bullet points, but with vintage black-and-white stills from the early days of film, modern cinema clips, movie posters, and colorful book covers from different eras.

The Result: The video felt like a high-end video essay. The instructor appeared on screen just enough to make her present with the students, but the primary experience was a visual journey through the constant remaking of Frankenstein’s monster in various contexts of popular culture.

Instructor Introduction:

Welcome to the Course:

 

Case Study 2: Public Policy Studies – “The History of Tobacco Regulation and Public Policy Advocacy”

The Goal: The instructor needed to introduce the complex history of lobbying campaigns, specifically using the example of the shift from the widespread acceptance (and prolific promotion) of smoking to the implementation of regulations, warning labels, information campaigns, and smoking bans. The challenge was making a policy discussion visually engaging without resorting to dry lists of legislation dates or a simple timeline. Oh, and the instructor didn’t want to have her voice pushing the discussion one way or the other, instead letting the media clips and advertisements speak for themselves.

The Execution: Applying the same visual documentary logic and using a narrative timeline approach, we moved away from the recorded PowerPoint. The instructor shared with our team a brief history of the tobacco debate as a narrative account, highlighting both notable advertising campaigns and key dates in history. Our video team then sourced historical assets to visualize this massive cultural and public policy shift.

Instead of seeing a wall of text on a screen, students watched the era of tobacco advertising evolve over time. The video began with references to the vintage doctor recommending smoking magazine spreads, Winston and Camel cartoons, and the rugged appeal of the Marlboro Man. As the lecture progressed into the era of anti-tobacco lobbying and eventual regulation, the visuals pivoted to match the policy changes, featuring clips of anti-smoking PSAs, images of cancer survivors in PSAs or magazines, and the introduction of warning labels.

The Result: By treating the lecture as a historical documentary, the content became dynamic. The students didn’t just hear about the change in public policy; they saw the visual evidence of the culture war that surrounded it and the way that advertising itself became a part of the solution. As an introduction to the topic, students were then invited to research the specific lobbying efforts and moments in history that led to the changes. 

An Advocacy & Lobbying Case Study | Cigarette Smoking:

Why It Works: The Science Behind the Story

While these courses covered vastly different topics—from 19th-century literature to 20th-century policy—the production methodology was identical. More importantly, the pedagogical success of these videos relies on the same cognitive and pedagogical principles.

Here is why such a narrative driven “audio-first” approach is more effective than a narrated slide deck.

1. Reducing Extraneous Cognitive Load 

One of the biggest enemies of learning is Extraneous Cognitive Load—the mental effort required just to process the format of the instruction, rather than the content itself. In many cases, just trying to keep up with what the instructor is trying to teach takes up half the effort.

In a traditional lecture video, students often face the split-attention effect. This occurs when a learner is forced to divide their focus between two overlapping sources of information: reading text on a slide while simultaneously listening to the instructor narrate that same text (or worse–describe a related but not identical topic at the same time). Because the brain processes reading and listening through similar language centers, these inputs bottleneck. The student ends up expending their mental energy trying to sync the two sources or decide which to spend the most focus on rather than understanding the concept itself. 

By removing the on-screen text from these mini-documentaries, we eliminate this most immediate friction. The student listens to the narrative (auditory) without having to “decode” text (visual-verbal) at the same time. This frees up working memory to actually process the story being told. While we do utilize images, the lecture could work similarly well as a deep-dive podcast that is audio only. 

2. Leveraging Dual Coding Theory

This documentary style is a practical application of Dual Coding Theory (Paivio) and Mayer’s Multimedia Principle.

The premise is simple: humans possess two separate channels for processing information—one for visual/pictorial material and one for auditory/verbal material.

• The Conflict: When you have on-screen text and narration, you are overloading the verbal channel.
• The Harmony: When you have relevant imagery (visual) and narration (verbal), you are engaging both channels simultaneously without conflict.

In the Public Policy course, for example, when the instructor described the “glamorization of smoking,” she was engaging the auditory channel. Simultaneously, the screen showed the “Marlboro Man” or old magazine ads of happy couples smoking at a party. The visual reinforcement anchors the concept in the student’s long-term memory more effectively than words alone. This aligns perfectly with Mayer’s Redundancy Principle, which suggests that people learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics, narration, and on-screen text.

3. The “Hook” of Narrative Engagement

Finally, we cannot ignore the affective domain. Research consistently shows that narrative-centered learning increases student motivation. By structuring the lectures as stories—with a beginning, middle, and end—rather than lists of bullet points, we tap into the student’s familiarity with narrative structure–they don’t need to expend cognitive effort on following along since they are already accustomed to narrative forms.

The “documentary” feel signals to the student that this content is of high-value. It mimics the media they consume voluntarily (like YouTube video essays or podcasts), lowering the barrier to entry and reducing the “chore” factor of watching course content. The added bonus here is that the videos were between 5 and 10 minutes long in length, making it easy for students to engage without having to dedicate hours to the class, as with many recorded lectures. 

How You Can Do This

You don’t need to be teaching a course on pop culture to utilize narrative technique. Many subjects have a visual history of some kind, and finding (or telling) the stories that relate your content to the real world can help pull the concept out of the theoretical realm and help build real understanding for students. 

What would happen if you wrote your next lecture as a narrative script rather than just a slide deck? What if you then ditched the slide deck entirely and worked with your school’s media production team to find the visuals to match your story? 

If you teach at DePaul and are looking to break the “talking head” mold, come talk to us at Academic Media Production. We have the studio, the editors, and the creative partnership to help you bring your story to life!