See how the installation of a lightboard has brought out the creativity, passion, and expertise of one community college’s faculty and staff. A lightboard combines the familiar process of lecturing/storytelling while writing on the board with innovative video creation. Hear experiences, watch examples, and try a mini-board for yourself!
In Fall 2019, Harper College, a large community college outside Chicago, purchased a lightboard for faculty use. A lightboard is an illuminated, clear panel, behind which faculty can stand and write with paint markers while delivering a lecture. The lecture is recorded, and the image is flipped in post-production so that it appears in the correct direction for the viewer. The result is a sleek, engaging instructional video that has a fairly low learning curve for the faculty member while providing a polished product for the student.
The lightboard was set up in a designated recording studio at Harper College and full support for recording, post-production, and hosting is provided by an instructional technologist and instructional designer within Harper’s center for teaching and learning. To promote the use of the lightboard, an open house session was conducted in Fall 2019 and workshops to train small groups of faculty were launched in Spring 2020. Within 7 months of installation, faculty and staff have produced over 130 videos in accounting, chemistry, physics, college initiatives and more.
Faculty that express interest in using the lightboard attend a planning meeting, during which they receive best practice guides, planning templates, example videos and a chance to practice on the lightboard. The majority of faculty find that they become comfortable recording with the board after just one practice session.
In this Discovery Session, a full-time faculty member will present her experiences as the “beta” faculty member on the lightboard and how she went on to record an entire series of videos for use by her whole department and beyond. The instructional technologist and instructional designer team that supports faculty in the use of the lightboard will present best practice guides, examples, and resources used to get faculty up and running quickly with the technology, as well as be available to answer questions about costs, set-up, and production.
Participants in this session will receive a recording best practices handout that can be useful to institutions even without a lightboard available. Participants will also be able to view example lightboard videos and try writing on a mini lightboard for themselves!