Making instructors comfortable with on-camera roles | University Business Magazine.

This article is a really good reminder and primer on some of the challenges related to creation of flipped content or distance learning. You can be the best instructor in the world and if you’re not comfortable on camera, people will have a hard time watching you and therefore will struggle to learn. Making faculty comfortable, reminding them of the goals, getting them to relax. These are really key steps in producing quality content.

The goal is for the digital content to be the same as it would be in person. Natural. Not wooden and stiff. Real emotion in your voice. A little excitement. None of that is easy or natural when you’re looking into a camera. It’s kind of like writing. I’m much funnier in person (thinner too!) but it’s hard to translate that into the blog because it’s all one-way dialog.

Recently I saw a pretty neat method of creating some flipped content. As opposed to just talking to the camera, they used a small studio space and had 12 students sitting in the room. The professor was describing a topic but was engaged with the students. There was Q&A and some real dialog. It didn’t feel canned or forced at all. The engagement with viewer of the video was enhanced because there was genuine engagement with the students in the room. Great actors and performers can fake this but it’s hard to do. This made it much easier.

We’re actually in the very early steps of doing some testing for a few different types of recording studios. (There a plan to have some studios in one of the new buildings being built around the football stadium but that’s 3 years away. It may as well be vaporware at this point.)

I see a need for three types of content creation:

1. Traditional videos. With or without slides that appear over the speaker’s shoulder or in front of a green screen.
2. Podcasting or computer and audio. Think Khan academy or YouTube how-to videos.
3. 2U type videos where the instructor uses fluorescent markers to write on a piece of edge-lit glass that sits between he and the camera. (The image gets flipped either in post or via a mirror.)

We’re actually working on a small pilot of the last one. Should be up and running by mid-march. Once we can show it off, we hope to be able to secure funding to build it full scale and find space to house it.

I’ll make sure to take some pictures and document the build process.

Stay tuned!