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Faculty Instructional Technology Resources -
Best Practices

Video

There is increasing interest in using web-delivered video as an educational tool. Some uses hold promise; others require a large investment of time, money, and bandwidth for very small returns.

Recommended uses

Video responses during online courses

Student in online courses often feel isolated from each other and their professor. This sterile feeling of "working alone in a box" is especially problematic to students who view their world in terms of relationships and prefer interaction to completely independent learning.

Video responses to threaded discussions addresses this problem, and also the issue of the time and tedium of typing responses online. The setup is simple:

• Students engage in threaded discussions over the course of a week.
• The instructor reads the discussions, then sits at her computer and speaks her response into a web cam as though she were giving feedback to the class in person. Response segments are 10-15 minutes long; total response time is no more than 45 minutes.
• The video is encoded (compressed) using free software and uploaded to CTools.

Download full instructions here.

Demonstrations

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a thousand pictures, especially in a physically-based discipline like nursing. Logical places to use videos include:

• Illustrating symptoms, especially ones that can't be shown with a still photo
• Conducting a patient interview or physical exam
• Using a computer program

Case studies, scenarios, and problem-based learning

The key to using video in case studies is to build in space for students to interact, think, and solve problems. A good formula is:

• Show a short (2-5 minute) video of introductory material to "set the stage."
• In small groups, have students recap what information they have about the situation, decide what information they still need, and figure out how they would get that information.
• It may be appropriate to show additional clips giving additional information or showing the outcome of student decisions.

This is far more effective than having students watch a 30 minute scenario from start to finish where all the thinking and problem-solving is done for them by the people in the video.

Good topics for such case studies include:

• Diagnosis, especially of "difficult" patients or patients who give incomplete information
• Conflict management
• Ethical dilemmas