Can using free online video tutorials through lynda.com enhance my teaching? 10 July 2015 According to Lasse Johansson (Course Tutor, Open City Docs School within UCL Anthropology) the answer is definitely. As Course Tutor and workshop facilitator/filmmaker for the Master s course Ethnographic and Documentary Film by Practice, Lasse has been involved with this past academic year s pilot lynda.com subscription. He has worked with colleagues both at UCL and at lynda.com to support his use of the service and to create bespoke playlists with suitable tutorial videos for his course. Lasse summarises, Media is constantly developing so it is great to have something which is not only constantly updated but has been created to communicate concepts simply and effectively. Are you thinking of using lynda.com but are not sure where to start? The five questions below will get you started: What is lynda.com? lynda.com is a platform paid for by UCL which offers users free and professional videos supporting learning in software, creative and business skills. UCL has renewed its licence with lynda.com for a further two years, meaning any member of the UCL community can login with their ID and get unlimited access to thousands of videos created by expert teachers for whichever level of instruction you need. How can it help my teaching?
In addition to teaching on the Masters Programme in Documentary filmmaking, Lasse is also teaching a nine-week undergraduate option course where students create their own documentary films. In selecting the course, students (who are from varying technical backgrounds) are required to have installed basic editing software on their machines and are made aware they will use lynda.com to self-teach some of the technical aspects. Lasse assigns a playlist to the course and tailors it to specific projects with the difficulty increased as the weeks progress. Playlists can be highly customised. You can include whole courses of several hours in length or cherry pick individual videos of just a few minutes to create a list that meets your exact needs. There are a huge range of tutorial options topics include anything from Audio to Teacher Tools, Design Skills to Writing. Lasse encourages staff to look through the options and tailor it to specific course and students. Given the limited time for teaching, it provides a go-to resource when suggesting extra learning as there is unlimited access at any time for students to independently self-teach. They are still able to ask for help in class, but the majority of the learning and practicing takes place outside of the classroom. Lasse comments, Most usefully, lynda.com allows me to focus on quality teaching time; students learn the technical aspects independently which means I can concentrate on discussing and teaching the underlying concepts of editing. What do students think? It s fast and free access to professional quality tutorial videos specific to a huge range of skills which will be useful for their studies and beyond. Before, students would learn skills through non visual hand-outs now lynda.com provides a useful, visual aide which also allows for learning at their own pace. The videos are up-to-date and have longevity. It means they can act as revision material whenever required. Acts as access to their own virtual tutor as videos can be watched as often as needed Any tips and advice for first time users? Know what you are looking for when you use it. There are so many options that it s easy to feel overwhelmed. Think about what you currently use, would like to use or what would be useful for your students and then integrate those tutorials in to your programme. It doesn t need to be separate to what you do or a huge part of the course; use lynda.com to facilitate what you already currently do.
It s easy to use and simple to navigate but spend a little time getting to know what s on offer. You will then know what s available to direct your students to when they need extra help. It also has the benefit of encouraging them to independently learn skills which is a key skill in itself. Develop playlists you can reuse. By creating your own playlists of lynda.com tutorials, you will have a resource you can continually refer to within your teaching. Ultimately, pointing your students towards the playlist will free up quality time to focus on academic concepts and learning rather than technical aspects. What support is available? The UCL ISD website has all the support you need including a tutorial video for lynda.com itself. If you would like to use lynda.com in your teaching, ISD can create a group for you that will enable you to assign playlists to your students and monitor their progress. ISD and lynda.com are also happy to help you to find the right resources for your course and build your playlists. All you need to provide is the module details and the names and user IDs of your students. Contact lynda@ucl.ac.uk to get started
Using Lynda.com in the UCL Doctoral School Skills Development Programme 25 January 2016 Daniela Bultoc (UCL Human Resources) discusses how the UCL Doctoral School Skills Development Programme, open to all graduate research students, provides an opportunity to expand generic research skills and personal transferable skills through face-to-face workshops and, most recently, Lynda.com online video tutorials. The Doctoral Skills Development Programme is open to all postgraduate research students at UCL and focuses on practical skills training courses to help students research at UCL and also to enhance their life skills and employability. These skills are an important part of UCL's research strategy and the QAA Quality Code for Higher Education. The skills programme is informed by Vitae's national Researcher Development Framework (RDF), a professional national development framework for planning and supporting the personal, professional and career development of researchers.
Students discuss with their Supervisor which courses from this programme and any departmental/faculty training courses they need to attend, and then select a range of courses to be taken over the full period of their research. The Doctoral Skills Development Programme covers the cost for students attending its courses. Over the past year, Daniela has worked closely with UCL Information Services Division (ISD) and Lynda.com, a platform paid for by UCL which offers users free and professional videos supporting learning in software, creative and business skills, to bring in a digital element to the programme. By mapping the entire programme, 70% of courses available (around 650) now have an online equivalent made available to students. UCL s postgraduate population is changing with more and more students unable to be on campus full-time," says Daniela. "The introduction of online materials has addressed this need. They are now able to access training courses whenever and wherever is convenient to them through a ready-made solution. The Lynda.com website is open to all UCL students and staff and offers unlimited access to thousands of videos created by expert teachers at any level of instruction. Daniela has monitored students use through the email sent out to make them aware of the resources. With over 11,000 videos viewed in the last six months, it's clear students are regularly utilising the broad range of videos available to them. Many of the tutorials talk students through technical software or essential training; the course rankings show videos relating to programming software to be most popular. Steady viewing figures indicate the resources are being utilised throughout the year. Daniela has sent out 'programme e-bulletins' about the resources. These reminders clarify that these tutorials are not a separate tool but in fact a supplement to their face-to-face learning. They are also very beneficial for students who can t attend the sessions or want to use the tutorials for revision. Course tutors have also been encouraged to use Lynda.com within their sessions. In the call for applications to deliver a training session, we suggest that blended learning or flipping the classroom might be useful course tutors can use these materials in a way that gets students to
self-teach whilst utilising classroom time for meaningful discussion. Around two thirds of courses are now run differently with Lynda.com s introduction. Daniela also hopes that using Lynda.com in this way will encourage sceptical tutors to see it as a useful tool in the future and that incorporating an online element will not impact teaching time but enhance it, particularly for non-campus based students. The next step will be to evaluate the impact and see if Lynda.com has contributed to a better learning experience for students. We will also continue to work with course tutors to encourage them to use a blended approach and think about how they can develop their teaching with Lynda.com. Using Lynda.com on a large scale has enabled time-pressured students to independently supplement their learning by self-teaching (and revising) and ultimately to move away from being passive learners at a crucial time in their early careers. On a larger scale, complementing an offline skills development programme available to nearly five thousands learners has enabled a broader range of students to benefit when in the past this might not have been possible.
Making and using video for teaching: Dr John Potter's tips and advice 7 September 2015 Dr John Potter (UCL Institute of Education) talks about the value of learners being creators of media as well as consumers as it helps bring subject matter alive and increases engagement. This video interview is part of the Lecturers on Video research project for ELE. Tony Slade and Clive Young from the ISD Learning, Teaching & Media Services team have been working on a project to develop a UCL Educational Media service. The research project investigates how and why lecturers use video and what their future video requirements are for successful student teaching. Interviews are then compiled with staff project examples to form case studies. An education producer, Dr Mike Howarth, was commissioned to produce the content for the research project. Watch the five minute case study below: 1 The pedagogical benefits of video making Students are able to anatomise something first: to look at how things are made, look at how shots are composed, look at how things are put together, look at how things can be changed by the use of sound and by the positioning of the camera - all of those sorts of things. But also in and around production it's been documented often that the group work is really important and significant for all sorts of reasons: especially the problem-solving of working with
video. But it happens all the time with some video making; teamwork and group work involve finding ways in which it's possible to have parts to play for a whole range of people within a production team, either behind, in front of or around the camera: producing, directing, acting or scripting. It has enormous benefits mappable back onto education. 2 Video as assessment For assessment they have to make a video and they have to write a commentary on it. The video is very open in terms of subject matter but we attacked the big emotions. We asked them to make a 92 second movie in a day, which is about love, hate, guilt. All of the big emotions and they have to do it within a certain number of prescribed shots. We give them a shot list and then they have to put the shots together. They involve all sorts of things: cutaways, close-ups, two shots, establishing shots, etc and then they put it together. They don t shoot with any sound. They add the sound later. They can add a narrative voice as well, we have facility to do that. We do not have facilities for them to record live sound out on Waterloo Bridge for example. But they write a commentary based on the decisions that they made in the edits to tell the story. It connects up every part of the module: it connects up the theory, it connects up the media in education and it connects all of the writing to the video itself. Only by doing both things together do they pass the assessment. We assess all this by marking together it is double marked and so one lecturer focuses on one thing, and one on another. Then the marks are reconciled; there is a sheet that we used to do this. 3 Feedback is varied but positive "Student reactions are surprisingly different but typically there is surprise in how difficult something apparently simple is. So they will start by saying 90 seconds is easy and discover it's not easy; certainly not in a day. It s highly pressured. But there is surprise and delight in the things that they make at the end. At the end of it they feel quite proud of it but are also surprised by the ways in which they learn from their mistakes. We encourage them not to produce something perfect and to know that they cannot produce something perfect in a day. They get close to it, but will have more to write about if they don't make something perfect. They have the if only paragraphs as well as if I had more time or a bigger budget or helicopters, I could do this or I could do that. We asked them to be highly reflective and their reactions are often delight and surprise in equal measure."
4 It s applicable to any subject field "The idea is mappable onto a student doing a formula or theorem or any idea really because it's a simple three-part stage, where you do a shot and you talk and then you show something and then you talk again at the end. It's a way for the brain to see from the audience perspective how things are connected together: how an idea leads to a practical application and then back to some kind of summary. Using very simple 123 cuts and with most viewing now done online with short YouTube clips, there is no need any more to be thinking that you're making the next Battleship Potemkin or whatever you regard as the inner epitome of filmmaking. You're making a very short clip with high impact and very low resource. It will bring subject matter alive and increase engagement I am sure of it." 5 A collaborative learning experience "I think the main point I would like to make would be around the fact that there is a myth that it's very easy to do. It is not easy to do but it shouldn't bar you from having a go. I think you learn by doing and you learn iteratively in making video and you learn alongside students as students learn alongside you. They will tell you what doesn't work and they will help you to do things. That s one of the benefits of video. It is a completely collaborative experience."