The Humanities in the Twenty-First Century

2007-08 NEH FACULTY HUMANITIES WORKSHOP

NORTHERN VIRGINIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Engaging Students with Online Video

Laura Ellen Shulman

Assistant Professor of Religion

Woodbridge Campus

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/lshulman/

May 2008

Video helps to “make it real” for students - especially in a discipline such as religion. Seeing a religion in practice and hearing about it from those who follow it, help to add a “real world” component to the student’s study and exploration of whatever religion or issue they may be learning. In the study of the world’s religions there is the added complexity of learning foreign terminology – often from a different language. I have been wanting to add an audio component to my online course materials for several years now, to aid students through hearing these foreign terms pronounced as well as spelled.

My project involves the creation and dissemination of a series of brief audio-video “mini-lectures”. Using Audacity to record the audio narration and then importing this narration into Photo Story, adding still images and some text, I’ve been able to create a series of “mini-lectures” that I will be using in various ways with my already existing online course materials:

1. Links to these “mini-lectures” will be added to my already existing collection of links to online streaming videos that have been produced by others (http://www.nvcc.edu/home/lshulman/videoclips.html).

2. The “mini-lectures” will also appear embedded into related pages of my own online lecture notes (http://www.nvcc.edu/home/lshulman/Rel231/lectures/hindu/origins.htm as an example)

3. I am uploading these “mini-lectures” to my Blackboard based course sites

4. Potential also exists for converting my WMV files to a format suitable for podcasting and inclusion on iTunes U or other such RSS feed

The content could be related to any discipline – in this case, the discipline is religious studies/comparative religions. The idea is to make the content more “real” through incorporation of real life examples and images. Typically, the videos I am producing run for just a few minutes but provide a needed supplement to text based material. No longer is the content material merely text to be read. It is now images and narration that will appeal to a wider array of learning styles. In the case of a discipline such as religious studies, which explores foreign cultures, these audio-video resources provide the added value of allowing students to hear foreign words pronounced, rather than have to stumble over an often failed attempt to pronounce the terms merely from reading them.

The tool used to create these “mini-lectures” (Microsoft’s Photo Story) allows the addition of text to the images so that the words the students are hearing in the audio also appear spelled out in the video while images are used to further enhance the multi-media learning experience and further “flesh-out” the ideas and concepts being discussed. I expect that these “mini-lectures” along with the other video resources I’ve been collecting for several years now, will help reinforce student learning through the combination of reading, hearing and visual learning styles. At this point I have created just a few “mini-lectures” but plan to expand the collection with up to half a dozen “mini-lectures” for each of up to a dozen religions that I teach.