Multimedia in teaching

Why teach with video?

When students have access to video content to watch outside of class, class time can be used for comprehension checks, discussion, and reinforcement of content.

Multimedia content helps to vary and enhance the learning process, and leads to better knowledge retention.

Educational video can provide more opportunities for students to engage with the content.

Students around the world can learn from course content made available through video.

Video can sometimes demonstrate complex ideas and access other times and places better than speaking can.

Video can help instructors overcome limitations like large class sizes and limited time.

What can we do with video?

Instructors can use video to provide supplemental materials for their students. This can help reinforce content and give students resources to prepare for assessments.

Many professors have benefitted from using video to flip their classroom. A flipped course is one in which students absorb new material largely outside of class time.

Instructors benefit from flipped classrooms. When a course is flipped, professors have more time available to engage with their students, rather than racing through introductions to new content. Once an instructor has created video content, they possess a permanent library of learning resources which can be reused for new students in various learning contexts.

Students benefit from flipped classrooms. In a flipped course students have more opportunities to engage with their instructor and peers. Students also can take greater ownership over their education, and are allowed a level of flexibility that is unavailable in traditional class structures.

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, are created largely through video. These courses consist of a series of learning modules that explain content, punctuated by comprehension checks at the end of each section. They are valuable for students around the world learning in diverse contexts.

Using Video at BU

BU supports multiple valuable platforms for creating and editing educational video. EdTech supports Echo360 as well as MyMedia (which includes CaptureSpace). Many BU faculty use their computer’s screencasting tools along with Adobe Creative Cloud products such as Adobe Rush, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Audition, etc. to create instructional videos.