August 24, 2020:
Operating under the philosophy that the medium of delivery has changed but the method of delivery should not, assuming the method was working before of course, here are more specifics about how I created my videos.
Keep it simple. There are many wonderful features in Kaltura that allow you to edit your video after you record it. I didn’t use any of them. I planned my videos before I sat down to record them, and then I recorded them in one continuous take. I understand the desire to have a perfect video, but I felt like editing out the “ums”, stutters, or pauses broke up the natural flow of delivery. Live delivery is unedited, so I didn’t want to create an unnatural, artificial delivery with a lot of editing. Now, there were more than a few times that after a couple of minutes of recording, I discarded the video and started over. However, the final video that got uploaded to my course was one continuous, unedited take.
Doesn’t have to be fancy. In my videos, I worked out practice problems on a small white board. This aligned with what I would do in class. Further, I would ask the students to “open page 10 in the e-book” or “look at slide 2 on the Chapter 4 Power Point” while I was working out the problem. This engaged them by having them do a physical action rather than just passively watching me. Of course Kaltura has the ability to screen capture your slides if you wish to show your resources in the video.
Keep it short. Most of my videos are around 10 minutes in length. There is some variation depending on the topic or problem, but I do not recommend exceeding 15 minutes. I know there may be that one topic or problem that you just need a couple extra minutes to get through, but try not to do that on a regular basis for two reasons. First and most importantly, students may not want to or be able to watch a video longer than 10 minutes. I know my mind starts to wander after about 10 minutes of a YouTube vlogger video that I am watching for fun, so I can’t expect a student to focus much longer than that on a video they probably don’t consider to be as much fun as a YouTube vlog. Additionally, students may have a chaotic home life, so finding the time and space to watch a long video may not be possible. For example, there may be children that need to be cared for, noisy family members, no dedicated workspace, and/or poor internet that leads to buffering of long videos. Second, buffering can be an issue for you too. It has been my experience that Kaltura will lock up or dump long videos when trying to upload them. If your video goes into that purgatory when you upload it, you lose the video, and I can assure you that is a depressing defeat.
Keep it accessible. I used the auto-captioning feature in Kaltura. However, I didn’t just rely on auto-captioning; I went back and hand captioned the videos line by line. Kaltura does an okay job of captioning what you are saying, but it is not perfect. In the caption editor, I watched the video and read the captions; then I would pause the video and correct caption errors; then I would back up the video and re-watch to be sure the corrected caption appeared correctly on screen in terms of appearing on the screen at the same time as the audio and appearing on screen long enough to be read. Make sure to plan enough time for your captioning. I found that thorough captioning takes about twice the time of the video, so 20 minutes for a 10 minute video. Remember captioning benefits those needing a caption accommodation, but it can benefit other students as well. Of course captions appear on the video as the video is playing. This can help anyone who is seeking clarity on what they hear in the audio. However, students that may not be able to watch a video with the volume on or may not be able to watch a video due to poor internet speed can read your video transcript without watching the video. The transcript link will appear at the bottom of your video once loaded in D2L.