Asynchronous Face Time: Creating Green-Screen Videos to Engage Students and Enhance Learning Outcomes

You do not need a degree from film school to create engaging videos to help your students better comprehend your course content.  This is good because video can be very useful in traditional classrooms, and is almost indispensable in successful online programs.  When we teach in person, we automatically use body language to help convey our meaning, because humans do not communicate with words alone, and videos allow us to capitalize on this to better communicate in asynchronous environments.

This presentation will demonstrate how to film and edit yourself--using simple, inexpensive equipment and software--so that you can superimpose your moving image over other material that will help illustrate your content. With a smartphone, some desk lamps, a bed sheet, a microphone, and a computer, you can create “green-screen” videos, where you remove the background and replace it with content-specific images and animation. 

Text does not engage the human mind the way moving images do, and combining spoken words, body language, and images communicates much more clearly and memorably than text alone, helping students understand and retain complex or abstract ideas because you are taking advantage of multiple modalities of learning simultaneously.  Seeing your body language as you speak is particularly helpful for ELL students’ comprehension, and it also makes you “real” for online students, rendering you more approachable, and helping them feel less isolated, and those two elements, while seemingly minor, have proven to be central for success in an online environment.

These videos can serve as pre-class homework to introduce complex concepts before you tackle them in the classroom, support students who are underprepared for college without singling them out, engage online students in material, assist ELL students in breaking down language barriers, and help all students relate to, engage with, and better comprehend what you are teaching them.