It's time digital media becomes an adjunct to writing for college students and instructors, and schools, colleges, and universities should provide basic audio and video production skills.
 

You’re watching an online video. The scene is dimly lit. There’s just a single harsh light on our subject’s face in extreme close-up. The sound, while understandable, is full of popped Ps and distorted peaks.

Is this a sequel to the Blair Witch Project, or a video podcast for Political Science 101? Or is this the future of educational video?

The do-it-yourself approach to video has taken the internet by storm, and more instructors and students are taking up the call to use digital media to enhance learning.

As both a media producer and educator I think this is a great trend. Yet, like a weary English teacher at a slam poetry competition, I can’t help but think that the quality could be a lot better with some attention to the basics.

Podcasting is about three years old, and it’s still a hot item in the academy. Go to any educational technology conference and you’ll be hard pressed to avoid a session that doesn’t tout podcasting as the best thing since the slide rule.

About eighteen months ago I went to one of these conferences and sat through the most excruciating sixty minutes of my professional life. I endured some of the most boring, repetitive, and poorly produced audio and video being held up as exemplars of educational media. Even more excruciating was listening to misguided faculty, with bounding enthusiasm and pride, tell us how their podcasts were helping them get through to their students, who were otherwise glued to their iPods.

I wanted to crawl out of my skin.

It’s a conundrum, really. I think the democratization of media-making tools is a powerful force for education. And yet I know that quality is a real value. Focused, well-exposed video is easier to watch, and clear, undistorted audio is much easier to understand. Where is this question of quality in the “user-generated media” revolution?

Lest you think I’m just an old media curmudgeon, I’ll relate an experience from another conference. I was participating in a breakout group on educational video. We were discussing the topic of students making videos for class assignments.

I ended up debating an experienced photojournalism professor who strongly argued that students shouldn’t be producing videos for class. Quality was the crux of his argument: It takes at least three semesters to learn the basics of good production skills. He asked, are we going to require all students to take three semesters of video production so they pass Biology?

As a media professional I took his argument seriously. But the teacher in me reflected on the college-level classes I’ve taught that required writing assignments. In a thirty-student class, I expected ten students to be excellent writers. Fifteen would be competent and readable. And 5 or so would be disorganized or barely comprehensible.

Yet, all these students were high school graduates enrolled at a top-tier university. Writing is the very currency of higher education. But by graduation a large minority of students still aren’t very good at it.

That realization led me to argue that holding average students to broadcast quality standards is as absurd as expecting them to write like Maya Angelou or Stephen King. I expect a broadcast journalism student to crank out video worthy of local TV news, just as I would expect a creative writing student to write well enough for a literary magazine. But it’s absurd to expect either of them to change places.

So, what to do?

A student has to write well enough that the teacher can easily grasp the student’s point without having to work too hard. Any good teacher is expected to speak well, give coherent assignments, and use an organized lesson plan or syllabus. The same standard should apply for educational audio and video.

Quality does matter. A student should never have to strain to understand her teacher’s podcast, and a professor should never have to squint to see what’s in a student’s video. Quality means that the audio or video never detracts from the actual content it contains. Unless the ability to produce video is the point of the assignment, the medium otherwise should be transparent, letting the ideas shine through.

I don’t think it’s that hard to learn how to record clear audio or take decent video. It does require knowing a few principles and skills that aren’t obvious or widely taught.

It is time for the academy to take audio and video seriously. Students, teachers, and professors should have the opportunity to learn basic production skills just like they learn other academic skills. They don’t have to become Hollywood producers, just capable of producing audio or video that communicates clearly. Schools, colleges, and universities should support this and provide that training.

No matter how much traditionalists might despise YouTube and iTunes, online media isn’t going away and will not leave the academy. If anything, digital media needs to become an adjunct to writing; neither an alternative nor a replacement.

Educators are eager to make the most of new media as education moves online. They need assistance from those of us who have made video our specialty. Our task is to help and instruct, and theirs is to see the value in what we’re offering. The shared responsibility is figuring out how to bring us together.
 

Source: Streaming Media Magazine (Streamingmedia.com)

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