In No Time at All. Effective Use of Asynchronous Video

by Anthony Sovak Director, Quality Online Education Pima Community College

Last semester during the Pima Online Educators’ Conference (POEC) we had a Student Panel Focus Group, which if you haven’t had the chance to watch I highly encourage you to review here. A summary annotation of the transcripts for that panel was prepared by Alexis Martinez, one of our student interns from San Miguel High School. 

For today’s column, I wanted to focus on the following two student concerns that came out of that work and suggest an easy-to-implement instructional practice that can address those concerns. 

In the panel, many student concerns centered on

• D2L General Clarity: Students want instructors to be more clear as it relates to all expectations and due dates and put them all in one place where it’s easy for students to view. 
• What helps students persist: Students find keeping themselves accountable, finding motivation, and time management are the biggest factors to overcoming obstacles. They also say that if they lose concentration it's very hard to get back to that mindset.

Students expressed both the need to know in great detail what is expected of them and a need for help staying motivated and accountable. While it can be difficult to project a supportive and encouraging tone in the online learning environment I think there one simple practice that can help you do that while keeping students informed. 

You probably already send an announcement once or twice a week that details what the students are supposed to do for the assignments that week. Some master classes have these built into the course. I want to suggest that using a simple screen capture tool you can turn that wall of text into a short 5-minute tutorial that not only shows students what to do, how exactly they navigate the system to do it but also gives you the opportunity to project an encouraging voice to your students. Taking the time to put those directions in your own voice is a sustainable way to intersperse some motivation, jokes, reminders about office hours and other opportunities to connect in that video can humanize not just you as the instructor but also the class and the work they are doing. 

In my experience the practice of two short, weekly videos walking students through assignments helps to provide clarity and not only makes students feel more comfortable about reaching out to you when they have a question but it will also reduce your inbox clutter as it proactively answers questions from your class. 

There are many ways to do this but I recommend Loom. If you aren’t familiar with Loom it is very easy to get started. There is a free pro account as an educator and here is a step by step guide on how to get started as an educator. Loom is in my view the easiest way to make and share quick videos with your students and it has a built-in interactivity to it. It isn’t the tool you want to use for meeting synchronously with students (for that you’d want to use Bongo, Meet, or Zoom). 

I have a few suggestions and recommendations for videos:

• Focused & frequent videos are best. No more than 5-10 minutes
• Encourage students to react and comment to the video once they’ve watched it
• Embed the video in the announcement section & email it so all students see it
• Use a video to give feedback on a whole discussion where you can connect the conversations between students.
• Practice doing your own assignment in the video in student view. You might find and eliminate a difficulty you didn’t notice in the instructor's view.
• Send a video for an audience of one. When a student hasn’t logged in or use it to give feedback on an assignment. Loom renders quickly so there’s no waiting around.
• Use the time to answer questions students sent in by email for the whole class. While you certainly should reply as soon as you can to the student who emails you, you can also repeat the question and the answer in your weekly videos for other students who may have that concern. This practice happens in a face-to-face class naturally but is not often repeated in the online classroom. 

As a sample, I made a quick loom video that goes over how I might personalize the content of this article. Have a look at it if you would and leave a reaction or comments to give some interactivity to it.