Video Lectures

For generations, educators have been recording live lectures and making them available for playback by their students.

Most of these 1st generation recordings are tedious to review. Speeding them up to double or triple speed doesn’t make them better…it just shortens the duration of the painful experience.

To be effective, electronic lectures should not be simply a taped rendition of a pre-existing lecture.

  • There are too many pauses, throat clearings, accidental mis-statements
  • The sound, recorded from the lectern, will generally be poor.
  • The camera (video) usually never gets it exactly right on whether to focus on the speaker or the screen.

The main problem is that the lecture was was designed for a live audience, not for an electronic screen, and the rules are different. The only benefits to this approach are that it can be produced inexpensively by pre-existing AV departments.

For these video lectures, it is much better to:

  • Use a script, written for the screen.
  • Record the voice in a studio, using a high-grade microphone, spit-shield, and several takes to get the audio as high quality as it can be.
  • Digitally edit the audio with noise removal, and gain equalized to unity. Shorten the pauses to a natural pace, and eliminate the audio imperfections.
  • The video channel should be matched to the voice track, using high-quality images or bullets that support the script.
  • The video channel should the general best practices for optimizing on-screen learning.

Here are some that I’ve produced:

General Women’s Healthcare

Gynecology

Obstetrics

Notes from a Medical Educator