Streaming Video Collections

Teaching Tips

One of the techniques discussed in the Best Practices for Online Instruction Workshop (Jason Ford) is the power of images to engage students. This includes reinforcing multiple modalities of learning by providing audio, images, videos and interactive elements in addition to the text. This approach helps the brain store the same information (or variations of it) into multiple areas for easier recall. Videos can help form imagery students need to understand the course concepts.  Try to incorporate visuals and videos in your courses since we know students respond well and create connections when provided visual content.

Videos, whether used online in D2L, or in the classroom, should be relevant to the course topics. Videos provide an additional voice in the materials: textbook, instructor, and video. Sometimes between several sources, students will begin to see a connection of the course content.

In general, when working with video content:

• Consider embedding the videos within your D2L content pages.

• Keep videos under 10 minutes, unless it’s extremely engaging.

• Use videos as examples for modeling presentations or speeches.

• Stay away from  "talking heads" – the video should create a strong learning experience with an engaging presentation.

• Create dynamic content using narrative along with embedded videos to create a seamless presentation with good flow.

You can find detailed instructions about how to embed streaming videos in D2L under the tabs for specific databases, listed to the left.

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