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University of Tennessee

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Newsletter: Fall 2004

Engaging Visual Learners with Video

by: Cyndy Edmonds and Jerry Riehl

How do professors engage students who have grown up in a media rich environment?

Try This: If you want to use video to enhance student engagement with course material, you do not necessarily need the skills to create these video clips. Let’s take a look at a possible scenario: a marketing professor decides that her students would benefit from examining interviews with professionals in their field talking about their marketing strategies, but she does not own a digital camera or have the more sophisticated skills of editing raw video.

First, go to The Studio, located in the library, and check out a camera. Shoot the interviews, then take the tape to Digital Media Services (DMS), who will stream the parts of the video that she wishes to use to illustrate the various marketing strategies. Thus, the clips can be created once and re-used in a number of different ways throughout the course.

Another route would be to use students as producers of course content. The instructor assigns the students the task of interviewing local professionals. The Studio is designed to serve students in precisely this manner and they will monitor and tutor students through the process. The students will give the professor the tapes they have made; she will take them to DMS to be digitized or housed on a streaming server. By adding these clips into Online@UT, she brings students into the process of learning by having them become content producers.