 Okay, thank you. Just share my screen with you again. So yes, I've tried to mute my own notifications here. Okay, well, thank you all for joining. My name is Dominic Kugesh. I work for the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Oxford. And so this is a webinar on what is the evidence for the various principles and practices that happened in instructional videos and what do we actually know when we talk about instructional videos. So what I wanted to ask you just to better start it, feel free to turn your webcam on and do use the chat. Feel free to just ask questions, answer questions that keep me an eye on it. And if you'd like to interrupt at any point, you can just raise your hand and to speak otherwise we'll just keep everybody muted. And so first I want to start by getting to know each other. What is it that you're hoping to get out of this session in this warm weather? So if you can use the chat to share some thoughts or somebody wants to speak up maybe, I'll give you a minute and see if I can... Okay, so evidence by suggestion what the research says, all right. Do you have any specific particular questions you're hoping to have answered? Length of videos, okay. We will spend some time on that. That's a very common one. Yeah, some just general tips. Okay, wonderful. Okay, well, we'll definitely... We'll include quizzes. Well, that's a good question. Yes, I think that that's another good question. So I'll essentially run through quite a few things. So if you feel like it's just too much stuff happening, I did create a link. I just shared that link with you in the chat where the presentation is. And we're also the... A document that I've created I'll talk to you about in a bit is where I've sort of summarized some of this stuff. And also many of the links that I'm mentioning will be there as well. And I'm just going to take my draws away saying that what is the technical skills that are necessary to make a video effective? So we'll talk about all of those. And I feel free to just periodically check in with you, but you can just use the chat for that. If you want to talk about make sense, if you're not sure about, you have some questions. And we'll also use a padlet. And I'll share the link with you in the timecams to review what people are hoping to get out of this. I'm just looking more in the chat and what people are also thinking about. So whether to chunk instructional videos, that's a very good question. Additional extended activities. And then Emma's talking about some good practice based on evidence as opposed to some of the best practice. And so that's definitely something we'll talk about as well. So that is just to get us started. So let's talk about then what are the principles and practice that we know where that goes behind what makes educational videos effective. And just a kind of a disclaimer, the start is not a detailed guide on using tools. Sometimes people are expecting that it's just an overview of some of the principles and the research evidence to be aware of. And we'll talk about roughly in these of six areas. We'll start with the principles of instructional video. And I'll talk about the evidence and I'll introduce the six tasks framework, a way of which I would like to summarize this. And then finally, I'll apply those to the questions about video production and how we can answer them based on that evidence. And so what is the evidence for effective videos? And this is something that's been puzzling me for about two or three years now. We introduced this new tool called RapidMook at Oxford. And so I started doing research about so that I can give people better guidance in this. And so this is kind of the results of the research that I've been able to collate. And there are many strands of research. There's research on multimedia that goes back about 40 years now. I should go back to the 80s. And then there's research on MOOCs, which is only about 10 years old. And research on the flipped classroom, which precedes MOOCs a little bit. But also we can look at other things, such as the view numbers on YouTube or sales of various products. But also we can listen to people's sharing of their personal experiences because there's a huge variety of instructional videos across the various MOOCs out there on YouTube and other services that we often overlook. And so I put together this video sampler of instructional videos of different types of videos. And you can, there's a link again on the link that I shared earlier on that OSF page. So there's a link to that. And essentially, so here is an example of six videos on the same topic. It's all about explaining derivatives. And as you can see, these are all quite popular on YouTube. And they take very different approaches. There's a lot happening. Some of them, not quite as much. So on the left hand, of course, here we have the Khan Academy, where just somebody's talking and writing. Then here we have kind of a more PowerPoint-based video, as you can see. It's a little more traditional. But here on the other hand, then we have somebody just literally just standing in front of a whiteboard and talking. That's just recording of a lecture. Here in the bottom, there's the Three Blue One Brown, a video, a very famous YouTube channel for math explainers. Here in the middle is kind of a more traditional. It's like a less animated example. And then we have sort of a more sort of an informal example here at the bottom. So you can see these whole wide variety is just one topic. And these have all found an audience, all found people who are interested in learning from these videos. And if you look at the comments, if you look at the view numbers, you'll see that despite their very different approaches, they all have something to contribute. So as we can see, we can go. So these are all from YouTube. And so where else can we go to learn about what instructional videos look like? And we often underestimate the huge vastness of the ecosystem of videos out there. So there's LinkedIn Learning, which many universities, for example, at Oxford, we have that available to all staff and students. So that has a very successful business model sold for a billion dollars to LinkedIn and then now part of Microsoft. There's Udemy, which is a place where it's kind of one of the alternatives to LinkedIn. Learning, your formula, Linda, where many people still create their own courses rather than be essentially managed. The very different approach, for example, is creative live service where they record live sessions with, sort of stage live sessions with audiences in them, which is quite different, but also a very interesting approach. You've probably all seen on YouTube being advertised, masterclass network, which has given more of an infotainment. But here's an interesting company called The Great Courses Plus, which started in recording audio lecture. Audio lectures in the 1990s goes way back in the course entire lecture series on various subjects from medieval religion to cooking. And that's now all in videos as well. But here's another series that people realize is also part of the ecosystem, ITProTV, and they actually run a little TV live sessions that they record, but they're always running some sort of live sessions on IT training. So those are all sort of, perhaps not quite as well known in the education sphere, but we all know Khan Academy, which started on YouTube. And of course, there's all the whole MOOC platforms, the edX, Coursera, Future Learn, are the main ones. But there's also this huge ecosystem of private video courses, people just making courses out there on subjects and selling them individually. So for example, Fstoppers is a photography website and sort of community and they create these really advanced, really beautifully shot sort of TV, David Attenborough style TV series or photographing. And yes, you can see they're not cheap. You can buy one for $300 in this case. And there's many others or various price ranges for various topics out there. So that's all important. But of course, all of this comes from YouTube. So I already mentioned YouTube as being an important source of information. And so we actually always going to keep an eye on what's happening there as well. And I'll mention some examples from YouTube later. But the important thing that I have, the message that I want us to focus on is that the bulk of the academic research does not consider these. So there's a huge vast ecosystem of people learning and creating videos for learning, but we don't have that good research on that. So here are three books that you may find that have quite a lot of research summaries of some of the often cited as very good sources of research. And so how often do they mention YouTube? Well, the first one is from 2009. So they can be forgiven for not doing that. And then it's a once and twice, the later books. How many times they mention MOOCs? Well, not at all. So how about the multimedia learning third edition of that book by Richard Mayer came out just this year or sort of late last year, but they're saying it's 2021 edition. And so is it all in there? So how many times get it to mention three engines? That's better. Unfortunately, it's all footnotes. And there's MOOCs, not a mention, LinkedIn learning, not other great courses or anything like that. Nothing. And of course, as I mentioned, TikTok, of course, that's not going to happen. So you can see there's so much learning and video production going out there from all across the sphere. And we don't really have lots of good evidence. And on top of that, if you look at some of the research evidence that we have, it's also based on quite old designs and approaches to multimedia. So for example, this really good book, Learning in the Science of Instruction, has that, you look at some of the examples, well, that's not the kind of things we're seeing these days. So we have to take that with a pinch of, so we have to understand the limitations of that research. Because I often see these principles of multimedia learning that are based on this research tradition mentioned, and you've probably heard about that as well. The number could be anywhere between 8 and 15. So it used to be the last time I heard about was 12 principles, but the latest version of the book has 15 principles. And some examples of some of these principles of multimedia learning is that words, is a multimedia principle that words and pictures are better than words alone. Coherence principle exclude extraneous words, pictures or sounds, signaling principles, highlight essential material, uses outlines, headings, bolding, pointer words, stuff like that. Spatial contiguity principles, when you have a graphic and its description, they should be near each other rather than some sort of an index. Temporal contiguity, when you're talking about something, show that thing on the screen and don't show other things. Segmenting principle, make sure that users can pace their own watching so it's better that the user can pace the learning rather than put things flow. Pre-training principles, make sure that all the names, concepts, definitions are available before people start watching the videos. Personalization principle, it's better to become a personal speed director to your audience than a formal style as redundancy and modality principle. Graphics and narration are better than graphics and text. Or if you have all three, so it's good to have a picture and talk about it rather than have lots of other things. And all of these things rely on what's been called the theory of cognitive load. And essentially, that's the idea of what's in your head. We're trying to limit, focus on the processing in the brain and limit all the distractions, limit extraneous additional load and support, promote positive cognitive processing. But there's a very big limitation. But not just the fact that there's not so many videos out and not just that there doesn't cover the range of videos other people are learning from, but it's also, it's based mostly on research that's on undergraduates who are beginners and it's mostly in STEM subjects. Because it's a lot easier to check and it's also, there's more of the early videos we're done. So that's really important to remember. This is not a universal video. And many of these rules and principles are broken by very successful and popular educational videos that people watch, like to watch, and they say they are learning from them. And here's an example of one, which is Richard E. Mayer, who's the researcher associated with much of this tradition. And, you know, he's not the only one, obviously. And he gave a talk some years ago at Harvard, which is an hour and a half long lecture, that breaks pretty much every single one of these principles. But nevertheless, I learned a lot from it because I'm not a beginner. I was already quite a lot of this stuff and it was very useful to see, to hear Richard Mayer talk about that as opposed to just reading a book. So it was very valuable. Nevertheless, none of those principles would be applied there. So there are also other... So the biggest research, the chunkiest source of research evidence is quite limited. There are more places to learn. There's other traditions. Jack Kumi represents one going back to the Open University, going back to the 1970s. So he has a book on where he kind of reframes that question as well. So that is worth being aware of it. There are some other research traditions. There's also the research on MOOCs, which is not that... which is not really... which is... wouldn't really constitute this strand of research just yet, but it's there some useful things. So I have tried to summarize this and other issues that I've come across from watching these... watching sort of looking at the research, looking at the actual different video practices out there. I would like to summarize under the six tasks of educational practice. But before we go to that, I just wanted to check if there are any questions or comments or thoughts. I like that discussion about the focus and length. Yes, so I think that's all very important. I'll follow up that link on that. Okay, so let's talk about what I'm calling the six tasks of instructional framework. And that is outlined in the document that you can see on that link that I shared earlier. I've also published a very sort of short summary of that in the media and learning news website that again the link will be in the presentation. And I'm summarizing this into roughly sort of six words. Attention, distraction, conceptualization, connection, navigation and situations are nice shin words to go together. And so essentially the idea about attention is that you want to direct the attention to make it clear what to focus on, which is similar to what we heard from Mayor. Distraction, well, you want to minimize the distraction to reduce cognitive load. So in some ways these to kind of summarize a lot of that, those principles that from Mayor. The conceptualization, support conceptualization to maximize learning. So support the ideas as well as the overall processing. Next one is connection. Make a personal connection to promote engagement. That's really where video shines. That's why video can give you more than just a book. Navigation is enable navigation through the video to give learners control over that, over their learning experience. And finally situation which is balance the choices based on learning situations. So for example, here are some examples of things you can do in these areas. So to direct attention, keep the amount of content on screen load. So don't put too many things. Use pointers or animations to highlight what you're talking about. Use multiple slides when you have a long list. So one bullet per slide. Use simple backgrounds. Use proportional transitions. Minimal animations. Don't add decorative graphics. So different ways of minimizing distractions. How you can also do other things in terms of supporting conceptualization. So one of the things you can do here is that you can, it's not just, and I think that the really important principle about conceptualization, it's not just about the watching of the video. It's also about what's happened before. So think about pre-watching activities. Is there a little quiz or just a list of words or some way of priming people before they watch the video. So they don't go into the watching entirely cold, particularly if it's the main source of learning. Explain new concepts outside of that video. Explain in a separate video. Make sure there's only set amount of new concepts. Make sure there's a clear structure to that video. And post something happens after the video. So post video quizzes. So those are all the things that are part of that. And so how do you make a prediction? Well, first you want to address your audience or speak to the people directly. Use a natural voice. Speak in an actual voice rather than synthetic voice systems. Actors just speak to you as the expert. And then have the face in the video as well. So that's another example to enable navigation. Provide a table of contents if there's a video. Create, put videos together in a playlist. If there's multiple shorter videos. Make sure the learners can actually adjust the speed of playback. And don't put little sort of advertising pre-rolls in front of your video. Just start, go straight into the meat of the matter. And finally, what are some of the things to balance in the situation? What are the things to balance there? So beginners consider whether the viewers are beginners or slightly more intermediates or experts. And that will have a great impact on what you want to do with your videos. Is the video conceptual or procedural videos? So are you talking about more general concepts? Are you explaining how to do a particular sort of a math formula, how to assemble something? And is how much time is available for the students overall? So the videos have a defined time. So it's important to keep that in mind. Is the platform that you're presenting the videos on flexibly enough? Does it allow all the downloads and things like that? And finally, is that something that people, what are the situations? What are the places that the people will watch the video in? So those are all things to keep in mind there as well. So I use these sort of six tasks because I find them easier to remember and sort of more descriptive and not quite as specific as those 15 principles of multimedia learning. They cover more of the choices. And they also sort of take into account some of the real video needs as opposed to just very narrow situations at the research. And I also find it easier to evaluate whether these videos do what you're doing, what you're talking about. But it's still very, some of the disadvantages, it doesn't really obviate the need for thinking about those principles all from the mentioning those. And also, there's quite a bit of overlap between those six tasks because you can never quite easily delineate things in that way. So next, I want to talk about how you can answer 12 questions about producing instructional videos based on these principles. So I'm just going to quickly check in with people in the chat. So we will see some of the questions in the chat right now. I will be addressing those as specific, these 12 questions. That was just kind of a pre. So what are the face and so on? We will share that. And I've noticed some people are missing those links. I will share that link again. I'm sharing that link right now again, just those of you joined late, they will see the early stuff on that. So that's where the presentation is. Many of the links I'm talking about as well as a document where I've outlined these things in more detail. So here are the 12 questions. So essentially, we're going to be talking about length, scripts, things like face, and so on. So let's go into that. And as I said, I have outlined this in a document that's about 25 pages long where I've tried to sort of address each of these questions, there's a list of references, and some dependencies there as well. And I will find a link to that by the link that I shared with you right now. Okay, so I've organized these questions into four areas, timings, delivery, and format and presentation. So let's start with questions about timing. So I want to address the question about length, intro or pre-roll, the speed of transitions, graphics, animations, angles and perspectives, and the narrative structure. So the question is how long should a video be? So let's use the chat. How long should an educational video be? So what do people reckon? What is a good ideal length for an instructional video? Less than five minutes, eight minutes, six minutes, three to five, 10 minutes or less, 15 minutes or less, five, eight, okay. So we're getting a nice spread here. And so I think what is really the important of the task, what is the video, what is the task of video trying to achieve? And I think the length of the video is really all about the control of the navigation that you can enable the user. So if you Google that question, you will find something like this. There are articles on the web itself. No video online should be longer than two minutes. And of course, that's just complete nonsense. That just makes no sense. Somebody's mentioned in the chat is the research on MOOCs suggests that the ideal video length is six to 12 minutes. The researchers is slightly limited in what it actually tells you, when people are most likely to drop off. And it's interesting that not everybody drops off at six minutes and after about 12 minutes, it doesn't particularly matter whether it's an hour or two hours long because people just don't tend to drop off that much. But that doesn't really mean that the video needs to be only that long. We're kind of confusing, I think, the cause and effect there. But that's certainly one source of evidence. But let's have a look at... So this is the YouTube channel of a business school. And so these are the top 15 most popular videos there. And if we look out of them, out of those four are well over 12 minutes and three out of those four are about an hour long, a little over an hour. So that seems odd, right? I mean, so that doesn't seem to quite go as well with that sort of injunction. And so here's... I was interested. So I went on YouTube and I just Googled calculus. And these are the five videos that YouTube thinks I would be interested in. And as you can see, they're all longer than 12 minutes. And many of them are part of a series, the short ones. But one of them is an hour and a half long of a guy standing in front of a whiteboard. And that has at 1.2 million views. And so again, so we see that people are not necessarily searching by the length of the video and often people are making sort of different decisions. And one reason, one thing that I think you can find on YouTube these days is a lot more videos are getting longer because people are more used to it. But also, YouTube has introduced this new feature that is very common in instructional videos or various narrative videos with information-based videos. And that's a table of contents. And the table of contents, essentially here, is in the description. People with all the time codes. And then you can jump around in the video. As you can see in here, this is a video that's an hour and a half almost long. And I have watched it a couple of times because it happens to be explaining. It's like a personal manual of how to use a camera that I bought, and I really wanted to learn from it. But I didn't watch an hour and a half twice. I just jumped around. I just jumped to the base that I needed to watch again. It actually happens to be this camera has two videos that are over an hour long, doing exactly that same thing and, again, using that table of contents. And we're all probably using the university with platforms like Echo 365 or Pinopto. And, again, you can create that table of contents. And I think that's more important. Giving is to use that control over that video is more important. And actually having multiple two-minute videos is probably just adding an extra cognitive, or sort of not cognitive, to really jump between videos. And if you look on LinkedIn Learning, you'll find that they will not have an hour and a half long videos, but often their pictures will be sort of like a lecture chunked into these. They're using playlists as a table of contents. So essentially looking at an hour and a half long lecture on something that is chunked into smaller chunks. And so we often sort of talk about attention as being important, but attention actually is a very complex problematic concept. And so we really need to think in terms of ability to construct knowledge and how people actually take, go through that whole process of learning rather than just the cognitive load at the moment of watching. So I think we need to sort of be quite careful there. That's not to mean that people should be recording an hour and a half long lectures, but I think that sort of 15 to 20 minutes meaningful chunks is probably quite sensible. And sometimes it's a shorter bit, five to 10 minutes, that's fine. If it's a bit longer, that's also fine. But in a way, is how can the students access it? How can they navigate it? How can they control what they're doing? I think that is really the important thing to go. And again, I think some of the commercial providers are giving a good account of what that can be. So the length of the video is... So what Scott is saying is that going back to the earphones, is this small chunk perhaps to do with consideration span expedition? And actually, as I say, really, I don't think the attention span is that helpful in this sense of concentration, because actually what predicts success of learning is whether the users have paused the video or whether they're interacting with it. So we shouldn't be thinking about in terms of, in terms of the length of the video, but more in terms of that sort of their control, the metacognition that is involved in watching. So I think it's barking up the wrong tree, focusing on the length of the video, and then we need to put the research into context. So what I mean by a pre-roll is these little sort of branding things like this video brought to you by such and such. And I just find it incredibly annoying, but also there's some evidence that on YouTube, at least most videos, actually don't get dropped off at like the six-minute or 20-minute or 12-minute mark. They could drop off in the five-second mark. Because often people come to the video and just want to know what it's about. And if it starts with like a five-second introduction of like this is the university that brings this video to you, it's probably not helping you. So you definitely want to get straight to the point. And you'll find that most YouTube videos that do this for a living, they will always start that. And it's a good way of getting your branding being hated by users if they have to watch a bunch of five-minute videos and each of them have a five-second little intro that's just kind of, that's a little pre-roll. So I don't think there's any benefit to that. And essentially it's taking away the control, the navigation control from the user. It's kind of like those FBI warnings on DVDs that you can escape so that it's kind of, you're doing that to them. And because it's really kind of getting in the way. So related titles is, how often should you change what's on the screen, right? So we talked to, again, related to that sort of cognitive load, what should be going on. And again, the tasks to think about here is attention and distraction and cognition. So what's happening there? So I think here the answer is the speed of transitions should be relatively slow, but it shouldn't be too slow. And the question essentially, the balance you're trying to strike is those principles as you don't want to have too many transitions to distract people, but you also don't want to stay too long on one slide. And somebody earlier asked the question of are we seeing videos or slide-based? And even if you don't use sort of a PowerPoint as a background and stuff like that, you still kind of think, you can think in terms of these, what's called storyboards, sort of like little chunks of something on the screen. So you don't want to have one that's there too long and you don't also want to perhaps transition too quickly, even though on YouTube, that is very much the norm these days, these really quick sort of jump cuts. And the principles for mayor I think are quite important, the signaling principle. So people are in best when they are shown exactly what to pay attention to on the screen and the temporal integrity principle is about speaking about what's on the screen at the time. So you don't want to have too many things. But again, there are many very successful instructional videos that break this rule appallingly, but nevertheless they're very popular and people still can learn from them. So we can always need to keep that in mind. The other question people ask is about should you change angles and perspectives during the video? So sometimes that's called B-roll, that's in the movie business, right? So that's when you talk about something, you switch the perspective in documentaries and infotainment, it's very, very important. So here's an example of B-roll in a YouTube video, by a educational YouTube video. And Thomas, this is Thomas Frank from the InfoGeek channel, College InfoGeek, and he's often makes videos about productivity. And so he has just talked about something, what's happening, and then he switches just like generic people sort of being in a meeting doing certain things. And so is this, it's going to make it seem a bit more sort of a productiony, a bit more official. So he claims in a podcast he talks about that actually increases the views about that higher production. But actually in terms of learning, there is no clear benefit in terms of in instructional videos. So often people kind of want to, they're kind of seduced by that approach and they feel that there's an advantage. But I say there is no evidence for that. There's some very small studies that show small benefits for nursing students if you switch the perspective. But it's not that big role kind of thing we saw from Thomas Frank. But it's more like focusing over the shoulder versus sort of a close up view and then switching to a person. So there's a very small learning benefit to this. But again, remember this is a procedural video. Whereas the example we saw earlier is a conceptual video. And that's quite a big difference, I think, as well where we consider those benefits. And so there's another piece of evidence is that video biographies on medical websites and they significantly improved engagement with that provider of the medical service over having just a text videographer. So just the video was enough. But having Vero actually did not make any difference in terms of engagement of the people. And I think that's kind of another good example. So, and I also want to, with that I think it's probably worth addressing the question of should we think in terms of the difference between whether this is a video made by you for your students or general purpose video for the general audience. And I think that's something that perhaps is important to keep in mind. But I'll come to that in a minute. So next question somebody asked that earlier. Should you include your face in your video? So how is that, should there be, should you be part of that video? And so the tasks that I want you to think about for the video to achieve is to again direct your attention and make a connection. So those are the two different tasks and sometimes they're competing, sometimes they're reinforcing. And the outcome of the research from what we know is that the face, having a face, meaning like the video, the presenter promotes engagement. But there is a significant minority, but it's about 25% of people who actually find it distracting when they're looking on whether they like that video or not. But the others who do like it, they really report that increased engagement. So on the other hand, having a face I think is a good idea because you want to make that personal connection. But it turns out, again, some of these studies are quite underpowered, relatively small. So it's hard to make hard and fast conclusions. But it turns out that there is really no benefit for learning one way or another. So it doesn't seem that people, despite the fact that there's a bit of additional quality of learning behind that person in there because people do spend some time looking at that person and switching between them and the content, but it doesn't seem that it has any impact on learning one way or the other. There is one piece of research that showed there was some advantage of having that face on direct face. So that in what you see here in the top left hand corner is a slightly better approach than having a side on view and for certain kinds of videos as well. So that's something that's important to keep in mind. And the one more thing is there is a principle for mayor's research that the static image does not help that much. So there is no benefit really from having it. If you're not going to have a video of you speaking, putting up a picture of you does not help. At least not consistently when you put it up at the beginning to show people what you look like. So that's kind of where we are. And of course, many platforms kind of let people hide the face as well. Yes, and Steve is saying, talking about having the face as an intro, saying hello to me and then going away, that's fine. But also it's important to remember there are many, many successful educational channels, Khan Academy of course being a standout here, is that you never see the face of the person explaining and you can still make a personal connection with that voice, with sort of having quite an informal personal and directed talk at the person. So the face, as I say, it's probably, there's no good reason not to have the face, but on the other hand, it's not necessarily a huge requirement. So should the video tell a story? That's another frequent injunction that I hear people make. And here again, all of the tasks are relevant here. But I think the most important one is the situation. So if you look at Jack Kumi's guide on designing video on multimedia for learning, he talks very much into the narrative, having hooks and visual metaphors. But actually the stories can be just as problematic. So there's very benefit, there are many benefits of having like a story because you can guide the viewers' attention, to provide some context for what they're learning about, and it can help also help making a personal connection. But at the same time, it limits the viewers' control. It can distract people, it confuse them because not everybody understands the story the same way and it can alienate some people because they may have different connections. So I think that the recommendation here is that it goes back also to the recommendations previously. It's important to have clear structure, tie together the videos with other materials, respond to the viewer needs, and sometimes having a narrative is the right solution or not. But I do often hear that question of like, that sort of suggestion that you should always have a story in your video and I don't think that there's any sort of evidence for that and we need to sort of think about this in sort of a more situational context. Okay, so let's talk about delivery. I'll just keep quickly glancing at the chat. Yes, and in terms of the face, Tom's talking about it's best giving the option to see the instructor face but obviously that's not always an option in most platforms actually. So here's some questions about delivery. So the first one I want to address whether you should write a script or not, that's a hot topic and a speed of delivery. And for both of those questions, the task to keep in mind is again making a connection. So one of the great benefits of the video is that you can make it personal and then so think about am I actually making the most out of the video by making a connection with my viewers and mayors principles of personalization, so personal delivery is better than more formal general delivery and voice, naturally human voice is better. So that's the principle. So let's ask the question, should you use a script? And many people say yes, of course you should always use a script but I think there's some balancing issues there. So when you use a script, you have a consistent video so if you need to make a very short video it's necessary to have something like a script. You also get free captions if you're reading the script, free and accurate captions. But it's really hard to make a good script and it's even harder to read it well. So I would say unless you really want to spend a lot of time on making the script sound natural and then reading it, that sort of doesn't sound like you're reading from a book, then I would say perhaps consider the advantage of not having a script because you get a much more natural delivery. You take advantage of that potential of the video for making the connection. And in my experience and I've spent a lot of time watching people record videos is that for most educators it is easy to speak fluently on a topic that they know about for 10 to 15 minutes without almost any big interruptions or disruptions and having those small little disfluencies in a video can actually be beneficial because it makes it seem more natural. And I think Khan Academy is a very good example which is simply somebody writing and speaking often sort of slightly backtracking and talking about what's happening while they're doing it and they can make quite a powerful connection there. Now in terms of one more point in the chat is that using a script makes it easy to edit together but I'll speak about that why perhaps that may not be a good idea later. So speaking fast or slow and it turns out that actually you should not speak very slow or sort of deliberately and slowly and there's a summary that suggests slightly faster speed of delivery about 150 to 170 words per minute which is about 10 to 20% faster than normal speech can be beneficial. There's two bits of research that I found one is very informal looking at TED Talk averages of the most popular TED Talks and they're roughly slightly they're slightly faster and there's another bit of research on MOOCs that showed videos with more words per minute have bigger engagement. So that's just like a small point about that and again it goes all back to the speaking naturally. Next, questions about format. So I want to address these questions so visuals and slide formatting use of animations and quality over quantity and production value. So what should your slides look like? And I'm sort of admitting here is that most of our videos as educators will have slides in them. So it's a starting point and obviously not all videos have slides you may just speak directly but remember that multimedia principle having text and audio or images as an audio is an important thing. And sometimes not sometimes sort of having going through that additional production overhead may not be that beneficial. So I'm sort of coming from the idea you start with a slide even if you don't actually use slides. And again the key things to keep in mind is attention conceptualization distraction and cognition. So that's kind of what you need to think about when you design those visuals. I'm not going to list some of the mayor's principles but I'm not going to list them. And essentially this is often the power points that people start with. And I think that obviously it breaks every single rule so it's probably better not to have these slides because they're making the cognitive load of the processing much more difficult. But you can redesign them in terms of that so that they look a bit more like this. So there's a lot less on the screen than on the text. There are sort of essentially little summaries and so on. So this is there is a way to kind of slightly reduce the amount of information that's on the slide or whatever the visual is. And I sort of summarize this under the heading as one bullet, one slide. So if you have a list of bullets that has loads and loads of points break it up into multiple slides like this for example. You may start with something that's like that what's on the left. And then I would break it down into having a title slide then a little overview of the key points that they exist with icons and then have each point separately on a slide like that. And that goes for presentations in general but if you're particularly combining it with video I think that's very important. And addressing the question of screen recording versus slides and I think in a way you know from the practice I'm not aware of any research that looks at that in detail if anybody knows do let me know. But there is if you look at the practice out there that we do know that screen recording is very popular. So Khan Academy is essentially screen recording but also about all of the practical videos on latent learning of like how to use Microsoft Word or PowerPoint or whatever they will use slides they will use screen recording. So I think that's quite a sense of the option. So sorry we already covered face my apologies. Next question and he's kind of this is controversial should you use animations and people often quite like animations they look fun they look like they're sort of how people learn. But let's think about this again from the from the tasks you're trying to achieve so you're trying to direct attention reduce distraction from a conceptualization and also give people control and input navigation and the quite clear research based guidance is that only animate processes that require movement so do not so for example that that means record animate things like things like the assembling of something or or there is for example like a dynamic flow in physics or something like that. But if it's like a if it's not going to admissions process is actually having a step by step thing is much better than animation. So we can see some examples here of on the screen we have so two different approaches of again with on the right on the left we have three blue and brown and they can see there's very there's going to be different approaches to video is one of that has lots of things moving all the time and they're both very popular but in terms of in terms of the learning and cognitive load there's a lot more out there on the left going on and you probably can learn more from that very basic kind of video then and from these animations in those animations do have some advantages in terms of promoting conceptualization so again you're making that you're just you're sort of making some trade-offs there. So so so so the key thing here to to pay attention to is that temporal integrity so show what you're talking about when you're talking about signaling indicate what people should pay attention to so that I think is the important but then addresses the Rebecca's question is bullet points appearing step by step reduces understanding and no that's not what I mean what I mean is is animating for example if you're if you want to animate an admissions process and there is literally little animations of like somebody walking into school picking up a form and stuff like that so I've seen things like that but bullets appearing side by side is not really an animation so animation is quite useful also if you can draw attention to something something that people people should pay attention to so animation on its own is not a problem but over animating is probably not useful it can be harmful and also it's probably not worth the huge expense of making animations because animation is quite expensive so finally a question of how highly produced should your videos be or sort of quality over quantity and I think the important thing again is think about the situation in which you are and the connection that you try to make with your learners and actually Sal Khan the founder of of Khan Academy made a really interesting video about his style his approach then of course it's been replicated in many ways and he essentially makes those same points you don't be conversational use visuals and colors but don't be too fancy you know just hand drawn is fine and it's better to have more stuff than less prepare your notes but speak without off the top of your mind don't use scripts and keep the length in so small meaningful chunks so I think that's that's kind of a useful thing and you can see the benefits on terms of learning may be quite limited so for example here's the same video in three steps from LinkedIn learning on negotiation and you can see sort of going into production improvements and we may see certain benefits there but it's not at all clear that they in terms of learning we're actually getting that benefit so here's another two examples side by side so on the left hand side we have somebody explaining a mathematical concept which is very basic so white board and then on the right hand side we have an introduction to economics which is kind of in that more YouTube jump cut style that's from the marginal revolution university explaining various concepts very busy lots of stuff happening also jump cuts back and forth relatively short videos whereas on the left hand side we have 40 minute videos they roughly have the same amount of views and I think they both may have a place for learning but can we actually say that the huge expense I went into making the video on the right was worth it in terms of learning is I don't think necessarily that would be the case but there's not a lot of research that shows that would compare exactly these things and we see often that's seduced by YouTube videos on YouTube lots of stuff is we see evolution from people kind of going from from sort of more basic to more elaborate but again they have a very different approach to a very different approach to video creation so we can see that the production value is there but I think people actually learning more with this I think we can hardly say whether that's the case or not and then again so this is the marginal revolution economics and we can sort of see that we don't necessarily even see that much in terms of benefit in terms of the developments in terms of views and the reason I want to bring that up is because one of the piece of feedback I was getting is why doesn't everybody make videos it just everybody has a phone it's so easy to make a video we're just snapping we're just pushing a button on your phone and it actually turns out this is not a real research-based thing this is just my illustration of this thing that I've experienced is that there's a sort of hockey stick in terms of effort and skill and technology required as you're going from making your toddler video to make a holiday video and then recording a lecture and recording with a green screen or a video and that's the more editing and the more footage you're trying to put together the steeper curve is and then there's so much more to learn so I think it's important to keep that in mind that particularly with the knowledge that the benefits for learning may not be there over the investment on the superficial production value and again from all the experts video producers are saying that if you're focusing on something focus on the sound on the quality of sound again I haven't seen any research that confirms this but when you speak to the video producers they make sure you get your sound right and the video and overall production value are not nearly as important of course there's a lot more involved but often people ask me how can I edit this video I've made a little mistake and I could do something slightly edit my video and my advice to people is that if you really need to correct a mistake in attending the video it takes longer to edit it than to record it twice but also as I've already mentioned small imperfections in the video make it more like a real lecture real connection so it's probably not worth it, worth it correcting that unless you have a particular sort of thing in mind and again the biggest lesson here I think is from in terms of production is that going from no video to having a video is more important is more important than having a highly produced video so finally I wanted to address the question of something that's often forgotten how do you present the videos to students and because we often just think oh I've made a video and then send a link to it and that's done but actually the video doesn't just exist as a video it exists in the context and so we need to think in terms of here what is the context of conceptualization how do people navigate control it what is the situation in which they're watching it and video is different from text it's a fixed time commitment so it's very hard to skim or scan or skip unless you enable that in some way difficult to navigate is bound to an equipment it's sort of a unimodal you cannot listen to music and watch the video at the same time and so when students watch the video they often watch them strategically they may increase the speed and as they only watch the video and have the captions on sometimes they will use a mobile device so all those things are important to keep in mind don't just think in terms of how have I produced my videos but how have I presented it to my students on the playlists can they bookmark it can they skip by the transcript can they change the speed of playback can they use keyboard shortcuts to navigate can they use the captions can they search the captions in s-text can they download it can they silent the playback and just watch what's on the screen so all those things are important and different platforms out there that you can look at will have different affordances they will allow you different things LinkedIn Learning you cannot present your own video on LinkedIn Learning but I would sort of consider that to be the gold standard for how you present videos so have spent some time on LinkedIn Learning or Coursera or similar ones and I think they have really spent a lot of time fine tuning the watching experience both on the mobile app and on the website and and then you have other tools like Phonopter or some like Canvas or VLE and they all have sort of different advantage and disadvantage in the document I've outlined sort of what I would say the feature sets of these different platforms and sort of start them in terms of the benefits they give you so again you can read more about that in that document but I really wanted to stress here is that if you it's important to let students share with each other how they watch and then recommend the features of the video player so it's not just going to put it there, expect that every student will get the most out of it, spend some time with your students if that's the context in which you are in of sort of let them share but also share with them some ideas on how they can watch the videos and I created the document I'll probably it's not published yet but I will share that as well with you on guide for students on how to watch videos and yes I see this digital study skills as being important here and finally the final word here is the question of the flipped classroom so it's not just I talked about the technical settings but also how do you integrate into the instructional setting and then so we have the traditional approach we have attending a lecture and then home activities whereas compared to that we have the flipped approach we have the people watch the lecture first and then they come to class and then they have classroom activities and the first approach is visual approach is easy to prepare but it's very teacher centered but it's also time specific which can be both a plus one disadvantage the flipped classroom is much more demanding to prepare for the teacher but it's more student centered and much more flexible so you have those sort of things to keep in mind but what does the research tell us about how effective flipped classroom is and it's a big success so students like the flexibility but it requires more work it has better students surprisingly more than some of the slower students it's unclear what impact is there on attending on attainment and it's important it's better for procedural learning I think that's really important for procedural or conceptual so those are some of the things to keep in mind but many of the things we talked about already come become relevant here have to make sure there's a clear structure it's relevant to class activities make sure the activities that you do in class expect that the video was watched there's a lot of understanding checking on understanding before people come into your class free training is the principle that I think is very relevant for mayors is that people learn better they already know some of the information so make sure that again people kind of focus on that so I want to end here I do not want to talk about production tools other than a quick point is that PowerPoint is actually can be quite a useful production tool for video so people often underestimate how many features there are and finally a hat tip to a new tool that's been around for about a year it's called Descript and we can edit a video by editing the transcript of the video and it's really clever and I play around with it, it's very useful so if you do a lot of video editing this is a very useful tool for that so I will finish here just with a reminder remember it's better to have a video than no video and I also want to share this link here to Padlet if you can let me know of things things that you feel that you've learned things that you will have stopped things that you will start doing, things that you'll look into things you'll stop doing and perhaps things you disagree about you have questions about and I realize we've just run out of time but please, I'm happy to hang around for as long as people have questions and do feel to, do again that's with me if you have any comments or suggestions so let me just have a look at the chat so if there were any questions that came up earlier that I missed as I was speaking I did try to keep an eye on it do let me know and put them there and again and let me have a quick look at what's happening on the Padlet, so screencasts are there any people already using screencasts yeah, we'll look into storyboarding yeah, that's certainly an option so I'm just going to sharing that here Dominic, if you're happy for me to I can add the links into the recording that will be emailed out to everyone yes, please do share those links I'm going to put the links to this in the chat again link to all the materials okay we'll look into pre-roll so I'm hoping that you will look into pre-roll, not using it somebody is saying editing versus re-recording, okay okay, recommending certain, okay oh yes, any evidence, somebody is asking any evidence showing that increases interactivity when inserting quizzes in videos and the answer is yes that actually is quite I would say there is some evidence but again, it's mostly about in terms of the procedural learning I think it's important to keep in mind if you have a highly technical lecture video a STEM subject where you need to make sure people are kind of building the knowledge slowly it makes a lot of sense to put quizzes as the video goes in for that procedural learning and there is evidence that shows that that is beneficial if it's for a more conceptual video I don't think that that evidence is there quite as much but again, the research is relatively limited and yeah, people will ask students good yeah, by the way one of the tools that I didn't mention is H5P, if you do need if you have some videos and you need to embed interactivity in the video, H5P does a really good job. If your university is nocto, there's a way to enter quiz and embed things in videos as well, so definitely recommend recommend that. Somebody mentioned stream on the padlet that's quite good as well but I don't have that much experience with that so what I was saying, higher order activities for conceptual learning yeah, I think conceptual learning, this is kind of an under appreciated and under investigated aspect of this idea of video so I'm not aware of that much research that looks and that in detail but I do quite like Diana Laurel-Arts approach in rethinking university teaching where she talks a lot about the importance of that so she focuses much more on the conceptual side of learning rather than the procedural thing. If nobody's got any further questions I'm going to stop the recording now if that's okay okay, very good thank you