My last post was about losing the thread, and losing the focus of what the course is about in the sea of technology available to us. I pretty much lost my way 2 days ago working on these very nice powerpoints for my courses.

I realized I was spending hours on one reading. How was this going to help anyone understand the readings, or the point of the class? Where was the value? What was the aim or purpose of that instruction?

I decided I needed powerpoints because that’s how online teaching looked to me from other sources. I realized that if I were in the classroom, I probably wouldn’t have made any for this lecture. I would have written terms as needed on the board or typed them into a blank word document on the screen.

I decided instead to adapt what I do to online and just put a blank document behind me to write things on. I think the result was pretty good in terms of a lecture that wasn’t too polished, and had many access points of engagement for students. The only concern I have is that it’s a bit long – I’ve been shooting for under fifteen minutes, but in this case I felt like it was warranted to go a bit longer.

This video is about 30 minutes which is one of my longer ones for teaching, but I chose to do it this way in order to capture the interplay of the various readings for the unit. I think a longer video is ok depending on what you are trying to do. The only time it wouldn’t be ok is if you think that since a normal class is an hour long, your video has to be an hour long. It’s probably better to do videos on concepts that last around 7 to 10 minutes (but much closer to 7).

I could have broken up this talk into 3 talks but the interplay would have been missed, and what the aim here is to get the students thinking about how the readings interact. Perhaps the next unit I’ll break it down more by reading and try to hit that sub 7 minute mark on those.