I some­how got on this Oncourse mail­ing list awhile back and usu­ally dis­re­gard most of the emails, but today they were show­cas­ing a fac­ulty mem­ber at the Indi­ana Uni­ver­sity East cam­pus who is using a Flip cam­era to record short lec­tures for his course. I think it’s brilliant!

Here’s more from the email:

Rob Tol­ley, Senior Lec­turer in Anthro­pol­ogy at IU East, was faced with the chal­lenge of describ­ing that and other top­ics.  Rather than uti­liz­ing just a writ­ten descrip­tion, Rob is mak­ing inno­v­a­tive use of the Flip dig­i­tal video cam­era to make live field record­ings of many of the processes and tech­niques that are part of his course curriculum.

“[Within the course Rob teaches], there are a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ties for me to do active demon­stra­tions,” Rob says. “This cam­era has made it pos­si­ble for me to show stu­dents things in an online course that I wouldn’t oth­er­wise be able to show them.”

The videos Rob has pro­duced have proven very pop­u­lar with his stu­dents.  “I can get a video up and run­ning very quickly.  On sev­eral occa­sions this term, I’ve had stu­dents e-mail me ques­tions.  I’ve been able, within half an hour, to record a short lec­ture or demon­stra­tion that’s allowed the stu­dent to get their answer not in text, but in video.  Those videos are then posted on Oncourse for all stu­dents to see.”

You can hear more about Rob’s work, as well as see exam­ples of some of his recorded lec­tures, by click­ing on the fol­low­ing link:
https://oncourse.iu.edu/access/content/group/1097251561621–1228/CL_Faculty_Showcase/tolley+center+pickwebstr2.mov

I have a Flip MinoHD and absolutely love it! It’s great this fac­ulty mem­ber had the insight to use it to show stu­dents exam­ples instead of try­ing to describe them in a long email or hand­out. I wish more teach­ers would take this sort of ini­tia­tive to improve the learn­ing expe­ri­ence for their stu­dents instead of stick­ing to old, worn out methods.

What I would like to see next are screen cap­tures of lab exer­cises, for exam­ple, posted to some place like Oncourse so the stu­dents can come back later and watch their instruc­tor step by step instead of hav­ing to revert to Pow­er­point slides or their own notes. Some might say this would tempt stu­dents to skip class, and I say so what?

What’s wrong with time shift­ing lec­tures or labs? The stu­dents who want to get the most out of the class can show up for the real hands on expe­ri­ence, and the slack­ers or stu­dents who don’t need the hands on expe­ri­ence to learn could view the mate­r­ial at their own leisure. I know this is start­ing to sound like form­ing an online col­lege, but these video sup­ple­ments could really improve the tra­di­tional col­lege setting.

Kudos to Rob Tol­ley for improv­ing his course with a tool I per­son­ally love!