Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Video for learning is great at some things, not so great at others. Some time back I attended a session on video for learning and found that neither the commissioners nor the video production company had looked at a single piece of research on video and learning. They told us that people loved the work and since then I’ve seen a lot of 'Netflix for learning’ delivery. That’s fine but let’s step back a minute..What I didn’t see was much evidence that people were actually ‘learning’ much. I have been involved in video production for 35 years, from corporate videos delivered on VHS cassettes, interactive videos on Laservision (in many ways way beyond what we currently see), CD-ROMs and now streamed. We even made a feature film The Killer Tongue – lost a pile of money on that one and lesson learnt.
Video is great for emotional impact and so attitudinal shift, showing processes and procedures, moving objects, going inside things down to the micro-level or to places we can’t get to like space or the inside of a nuclear reactor. It can also present people, talking to you. But what works best for LEARNING? The evidence shows that many of the things we do in video are just plain wrong. There’s decades of research on the subject, that mostly remains unread and unloved. For a good summary, read Brahme (2016). So let’s surface a few of these evidence-based pointers.

With advent of technology in education, video aided solutions became an instant favorite of every user as well as students.

Students tend to enjoy the video resources a lot as this one form of multimedia includes sound, text as well as graphics/images.

And so with it came many solutions with added and advanced features like collaboration, live lectures and what not! This post is to help you explore one such cool tool we came across recently called, Panopto.

“There’s just not enough time in class with students!” It’s a common faculty complaint and when students are provided quality course materials they can use outside of class, this blended learning approach gives faculty more time in class. There’s a variety of materials that can be developed for use outside of class. In this article we’d like to focus on creating video content that students use for a blended learning course.

Teachers are always striving to show more and tell less when introducing students to new information, concepts, and skills. Education researcher Pauline Gibbons tells us, “Rather than trying to simplify information, amplifying the curriculum means finding as many ways as possible to make key information comprehensible.”