From Peter Navarro.
DO break each of the presentations up into short modules. A good guideline is that such modules should be 3 to 7 minutes, and never exceed that limit.
…Do NOT wing it. I always write scripts for everything I record either on camera or as voiceover—umms, ahs, and awkward pauses or rambling threads just don’t cut it with today’s discerning students.
This latter is a problem for me. On the one hand, I um and ah a lot, which argues for scripting. On the other hand, reading a scripted presentation is too boring for me.
In fact, if you ever encounter me giving a live event, you will find the prepared presentation disappointing and the Q&A to be the best part.
All in all, although I have done a lot of instructional Youtube videos, I do not believe that it is my comparative advantage.
Navarro adds this:
After cascades of student complaints, Coursera decided to experiment with the on-demand format, with me as one of their first guinea pigs. With this approach, eager beavers can now “binge” their way through my Coursera courses as fast as Netflix users have gone through a season of House of Cards. At the other end of this on-demand spectrum, slow pokes can turn a normal ten-week race into a six-month marathon—and thereby better avoid contributing to the high drop-out rate symptomatic of MOOCs
I really think that the issue goes beyond this. The idea of a “course” may be an unnatural construct in the on-line world. As a student, you tend to be more interested in the parts than in the whole. When you want to get into a large body of material, a book may be the best format.
I’ve looked at a few online courses, and I wish more of them were upfront about the purpose of a particular module. Is it a kind of interesting factoid familiarization, skill or tool that will be handy later, or particular isolated case worth knowing about, or does it have a larger role as a building block of a greater, deeper understanding? And so forth.
Both teachers and students in regular courses are already apt to lose sight of the big picture and start simply going through the motions and checking off all the boxes of topics to cover in the curriculum. And I’d guess a problem with being too ‘modular’ is that is could exacerbate this tendency.
For what it’s worth, the military faces this problem as it has to teach (and re-teach, over and over) new recruits on hundreds of different, little tasks and topics, but which combine into a bigger gestalt. If one sticks to the officially recommended style (not guaranteed by any means), then the trainers of the little blocks of instruction are required to state the objective and point up front, and to show how the puzzle piece fits into the big picture.
“The idea of a ‘course’ may be an unnatural construct in the on-line world. As a student, you tend to be more interested in the parts than in the whole.”
I think that it has always been unnatural, but the online world makes it possible to bypass it in the same way that fax machines, email, and electronic bill payments finally allowed us to go around the post office.
In college I wanted to take a computer graphics course. A prerequisite for computer graphics was a linear algebra course because you do a lot of matrix transformations in graphics.
The information I actually needed from the linear algebra course was covered in less than two weeks. It took a whole quarter of wasted time in linear algebra, a wad of money to pay for the course, and a lot of wasted brain power learning unneeded information to get what I wanted.
Online learning works best today when you know what it is that you want to learn.
When you have just a general notion of what you want to learn, there’s almost too much to choose from. Along with well constructed courses, well thought out and efficient learning paths are needed too.
There are many topics where I’ve enjoyed a five-minute video from a good teacher.
I can’t imagine sitting through a 30-minute online class, though. I would want to skip around to the parts I care about, which is much easier in a text format.
I don’t think you’re supposed to read the script, but rather memorize it and “perform” it, as if it were a play or speech.
I think it is important to NOT wing it because people often use imprecise or unclear language that leave students with less that maximized understanding. I do not think that you need to read the script but in the act of writing it think about each word.
One possibility that might thread the needle for you is a multiple-take and/or iterative approach.
Record 3-5 ‘takes’ of the same module, then pick the best. Or, listen to each take after recording it, and decide if it’s up to spec. If not, re-do it until it’s satisfactory. The process accomplishes much of what a prepared script will do, does it more intuitively, and probably still takes less time than writing a prepared script
It’s one thing to teach a class year after year and not have the best presentation skills. The university can’t afford to have actors deliver your carefully written talk.
But if you are preparing a video course that will be viewed thousands of times, then yes, do it professionally. If you don’t have a smooth delivery, hire someone who does.
How ’bout a modified paragraph structure. The script which you say verbatim is the bullet point in sentence form at the head and a rephrase repeating of the point for the emphatic button. The middle supporting points can be more improvisational.
Precisely because the 16-week course is an artificial construct that has nothing to do with learning, I am one of those contributors to Coursera’s high drop-out rate. I enroll in lots of courses just to have access to the content with no intention of following along during the 16 weeks.
The course logistics deals with the signaling value to the student and the monetization strategy of the teacher. Presumably someone with your “use case” needs actual knowledge, maybe even to complete assignments for courses offered elsewhere.
“In fact, if you ever encounter me giving a live event, you will find the prepared presentation disappointing and the Q&A to be the best part.”
Same here. Whenever I prep a presentation, I write the script to be about 1/3rd the allotted time to save the remaining 2/3rd for Q&A because a) there will be questions and b) most fun part.
What about student-instructor interaction? A course is more than just course materials (videos, books, lecture notes, exercises). There is also an interaction component to learning.
I’m concerned that this distinction appears to be disappearing. But I also understand that interaction is costly, not scalable, and therefore probably doomed, at least in its old-world format. This could be replaced by tutors, who are not the course designers/instructors.
The interaction component is the ongoing expensive part of online education. It is why a number of colleges have figured out that putting courses online doesn’t save you a lot of money.
To really scale things up, the interaction component either has to be dropped or picked up exclusively by the students.
Linear forms like audio/video can make random access more difficult which is why breaking it into small portions complete with introductions and conclusions can be helpful. Text can be better at this for that reason though attention demanding.