Instructor Made Videos in the Classroom: A Method to Create Impactful Connections with Instructors and Increase Student Engagement

 Instructor Made Videos in the Classroom: A Method to Create Impactful Connections with Instructors and Increase Student Engagement

Online education has evolved over the past 25+ years and will continue to change over the next 25 years! Students pursuing an online education today have more opportunities and resources than the pioneer students that were first introduced to a form of online learning at the University of Illinois in the 1960’s. This first venture into online learning took place before the internet was invented and therefore was limited to an internal intranet for these few students to listen to course recordings or view course materials. We can guess that the goals of these original ventures were to provide students with material and information they missed in the classroom and not to provide them with all course materials and information via the online platform (a totally online course). Therefore, these students still had the opportunity to interact with other students and the instructor in a traditional classroom setting. Students enrolled in online courses today, don’t necessarily have the same opportunities of interaction, engagement, and connection. This is an issue that many online instructors and universities struggle with; How can we form these connections and relationships online?

There has been a significant increase in online courses over the past 25 years and consequently new innovations in the online classroom are being developed and studied in order to identify best practices. Many online courses are created to provide students with uniform instruction, content, knowledge, and skills, but lack a connection to the instructor and have a low rate of student engagement. We have struggled with this at our university in our undergraduate programs. How can we take a course that is being taught by different instructors and ensure that all students are getting the same content, but at the same time increase student engagement, build relationships and create a connection to the instructor? We all want to ensure our courses are giving students a high quality and effective education, that result in student satisfaction and success. You don’t have to be reminded that student satisfaction is the most important key for them to continue learning and ultimately reaching their goal of academic success. Personalized instructor made videos, created by the individual instructor teaching the course and specific to the term, was one of our answers to making connections and increasing engagement in online learning environment, while building a relationship between the student, instructor, and university. All our courses have videos and media embedded in them on the course content and based on what skills and knowledge we want the students to acquire, however they were lacking a personal connection for both students and instructors. Instructor Made Videos was one method that we recently implemented in our introductory classes (some of the first courses students will take). These courses were previously identified as having a lower retention rate and a higher rate of students struggling with adapting to an online education/classes. This specific method (Instructor Made Videos) was shown to have a positive impact for students and instructors. Data will be presented that shows the increase in student engagement, questions, and inquires within the classrooms with personalized videos. Instructors create a welcome video to introduce themselves to the students, provide an overview of the course, provide contact information, and encouragement to reach out to the instructor with any issues or concerns. In addition, weekly videos are created to address any student questions that arose during the previous week, introduce the next week’s topic/lesson, and simply make a stronger connection.

The goal of creating personal videos was to give students a more personal connection to the instructor and the university. Students who felt more connected to the instructor and received more instruction and details on the course, course assignments, and expectations were more likely to stay engaged throughout the entire course.  The data and observations that we have made in these courses, provided us with information, details, and examples to share in this presentation to not only assist others in creating videos, but to explain why we feel this can be a unique method to create impactful connections between students and instructors. With the success we are seeing in these courses, we hope to replicate this in other courses in our programs over the next year. This educational session will walk participants through the steps of getting buy in from instructors, creating instructor made videos, implementing the videos in the classroom, and the positive results we have seen in these courses. During the creation and implementation of the videos, a very important aspect emerged that had an impact on the level of connection that students felt and degree of engagement within the classroom. The instructor’s personality, characteristics, video content/tone were shown to have an impact with the students. We will discuss this in our presentation and provide examples of different videos and how specific instructors are more likely to connect with students through videos and creating an open and welcoming class environment. In addition, student perception and satisfaction evidence will be presented, along with data supporting the level of student engagement in courses with and without videos. We will also discuss tips and tricks that we learned along the way to creating instructor made videos to personalize your courses.

Session Overview

This session is structured in the following format:

1. Introduction- Introduce speakers and topic
2. Presentation/Educational Information- Provide background on project and future implications, along with evidence and findings- Examples of videos will be shown
3. Interactive Poll- Using an online polling application, all participants will have the opportunity to provide their input and experience with creating videos and the impact it has had with students and the connection to instructors
4. Reflection and small group activity- participants will be broken into small groups or partners to brainstorm how they can replicate this (creating personal videos) in their courses/universities, identify the resources they currently have available, and the connections/implications videos will have for students and instructors
5. Wrap up Conversation/Discussion (Question and Answer)

Session Goals

Participants in this educational session will be able to describe how to create and implement personalized instructor made videos in the classroom. They will also be able to discuss the anecdotal evidence and data that supports creating videos in the classroom to increase student engagement and make a positive connection/relationship to the instructor and university. In addition, participants and presenter will discuss how instructor characteristics/personality shown in the videos impact student engagement and connection.