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Building Student Engagement with Faculty Presence Using Video

Research shows that faculty presence and perceived connection in an asynchronous, online course can increase student satisfaction, motivation, and retention and reduce student feelings of isolation and confusion. Including weekly video announcements and/or lesson introductions is one way to accomplish this. Instructors who feel free to be themselves in these videos give students the chance to “see” and relate to them, and in fact, Glazier (2016) encourages using humor and satire in weekly videos as a method of building positive relationships with students. Additionally, filming at iconic University locations can help build a sense of connection and Penn State pride.

The bottom line is that a commitment to being present in your course can lead to an enhanced learning experience for everyone involved.

Tips for your video:

  • Keep videos short -- 1 to 3 minutes is ideal.
  • Be authentic, warm, approachable, and genuine.
  • Model appropriate communication and sharing behaviors for your students.
  • Avoid anything that will date the video if you plan to reuse it for future semesters.
  • Use a script! (Improvisation tends to produce ineffective video.)
  • Include a hook to the lesson, a short description of assignments, a note about difficult topics, a reminder to reach out to you with questions, and some personal or professional information if you are comfortable and it is appropriate.
  • Shoot on location if possible (campus locations, places related to the class/major, etc.)
  • Do not overthink production value. Using a selfie stick and a smartphone should be sufficient.

See the examples below to learn about building student engagement with video to introduce an instructor, course, or lesson, to post announcements, or to present lesson content.

Professor talking. Oil storage tank is in the background.

Credit: © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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See it in Practice

Credit: Jim Detwiler © Penn State University, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

JIM DETWILER: Hi. I'm Jim Detwiler, a member of Penn State's Online Geospatial Program Faculty. I teach three courses in our program, GIS Programming and Automation, Web Application Development, and Spatial Database Management. I really enjoy teaching in this program because of the consistently high quality of the students that we work with and the working professional population we serve.

The main purpose of this video is to give you an opportunity to learn something about one of the people behind the courses that you take. So let me tell you a little bit about myself. I live just a few miles up the road from State College here, where Penn State's main campus is located, with my beautiful wife and our son. You might be wondering about this building behind me. This is Pegula Ice Arena, where my son and I spend a lot of our free time. He plays youth hockey here, and has the misfortune of having me as one of his coaches. And I also get to play here in the world famous NHL, the Nittany Hockey League. So anyway, thanks for watching. I hope you'll be able to enroll in one of my courses. And if you have any questions about those courses, please don't hesitate to contact me.

In this video (1:17 minutes), a faculty member provides a brief and engaging introduction to Penn State’s Online Geospatial Program and his role as an instructor for three courses in that program.

This short video provides a lot of information in just over a minute, modeling a thoughtful and concise presentation that’s also fun to watch. And during a peek into his recreational involvement with ice hockey, the instructor allows viewers to connect with his personality.

This video is effective because it’s concise, well-edited, and effectively shot.

Considerations

  • When referring to visual elements, mention or describe what students are looking at so that students that can’t see the video know what you are referring to.
  • Videos must have closed captions and transcripts. For short videos, the YouTube auto-captions are fairly simple to edit and convert to a transcript.

Related Examples

YouTube

Contributor(s)

Credit: Haley Sankey © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

HALEY SANKEY:

Hi Everyone, ah, I just wanted to take a minute to tell you how much I really enjoyed lesson seven and lesson eight.

You guys knocked it out of the park with both submissions and the videos, in particular for lesson 8, were

fantastic. I think you all did a really good job preparing for your discussions, which is what I'd hoped; you learned a

little bit about a different technology, and also got to know one or more of your classmates, which I think is great.

You can see my RV there in the background. We're boondocking in Central Florida right now;

boondocking is a type of camping where you're completeley self-sufficient and you're not really plugged into anything.

In my opinion, it's the best kind of camping because you're in the middle of nowhere.

You can see these gorgeous trees behind me, here. Anyway also I want to tell you about lesson nine - it's about

study habits and how to be successful as an online student. I think that there's some really good tips in the lesson, so

please be sure to read through it. Do your best to really give me an honest

schedule when you submit the schedule that I've asked you to submit. You know, everybody's got a ton going on.

School, work, kids, family responsibilities, coaching the best way to to hold off stress is to plan.

So you're gonna be a lot more successful than somebody who's just kind of winging it and says, "Well, I'll figure

out, like, when I'm gonna do my classwork as the week goes," you're gonna end up procrastinating. And I'm sure several

you've experienced that already this semester. Anyway, if you have any questions about this I might get in touch with me,

and I hope you're all doing well, and we don't have a whole lot of time left in the semester so I hope that you're

getting more comfortable with the technology and with each other, and also you do not have your summer

or your fall classes scheduled yet do that ASAP.

All right. bye!

In this short, weekly announcement video (2:30 minutes), the instructor provides a good deal of pertinent information for her students.

In addition to the content of the announcement, the instructor is allowing the students a glimpse into her real life, as she is working remotely from a campsite in Florida. In other videos, she is in her office, at the Nittany Lion Shrine, etc.

This video is effective because it’s concise, casual, and positive, was easily produced, and models appropriate communication and sharing behaviors.

Considerations

Accessibility

  • When referring to visual elements, mention or describe what students are looking at so that students that can’t see the video know what you are referring to.
  • Videos must have closed captions and transcripts. For short videos, the YouTube auto-captions are fairly simple to edit and convert to a transcript.
     

Other 

This example could also be created using Canvas, Kaltura or Zoom.

Related Examples

Canvas
Kaltura
YouTube
Zoom

Contributor(s)

Credit: Metallic Glass by A. Kimmel © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

So we've been talking about what is Material Science and Engineering. And in this demonstration, I would like to show you an example of how we manipulate materials. Except here, what I'm going to do is I'm actually only going to manipulate the physical structure of the material. I'm not going to change the chemistry.

And so what I have in front of you is a couple of pieces of stainless steel. And here on my left is stainless steel as we all know and love and use in everyday life. And to show what happens when I change physical structure, we're going to do sort of a thought experiment. And so what I have in my hand here is a ball bearing. And I'm going to, in a minute, drop this ball bearing and let it hit the piece of steel. But before we do that, let's think about what's going to happen.

So as I drop the ball, it has kinetic energy, it's going to strike the surface. And that energy is going to be transferred into the surface. And what's going to happen is that this piece of stainless steel is going to receive that energy by deforming. And that deformation is made possible by a movement of dislocations. And the best way that I can sort of explain this is to try to pass my knuckles past one another. OK. When I try to do this there's a little bit of energy I have to overcome. But once I do that, they slide pretty nicely. All right. That's dislocation motion in metals.

And so what's going to happen is as this ball hits the surface, the dislocations are going to move, and that's going to absorb energy. That energy that's absorbed is no longer going to be in the ball bearing. And so as a consequence, the ball bearing will bounce but not very far. So let's see that in action.

Pretty boring. All right. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this piece of metal, which we've previously described as being crystalline. And I'm going to change that crystalline nature too amorphous. So the opposite of crystalline is amorphous. Crystalline, I have periodic arrangements of atoms, very ordered structure, every atom looks like every other atom. Think of a marching band, marching in line. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this piece of steel and I'm going to melt it so it's a liquid. And then instead of allowing it to cool slowly to equilibrium, I'm going to cool it at thousands of degrees per second. And in doing that, I'm going to freeze in this amorphous structure.

An amorphous structure would be random chaotic arrangements of atoms. So that no two atoms look the same in terms of their neighborhood and the neighboring atoms. And the most obvious example of an amorphous material is window glass. So window glass is a solid with an amorphous structure.

So now we're going to do the exact same experiment. I'm going to drop the ball but now it's going to land on a piece of this amorphous metal or what we call metallic glass. And let's see how that changes the behavior.

So now since this material is amorphous, the dislocation movement mechanism is no longer present. And so as a consequence, there's no really easy way to transfer the energy from that ball into the surface of that material. And so as a consequence, more of the energy goes back into the ball. And so the ball continues to bounce and bounce and bounce. And so this metallic glass or amorphous metal is used in things like golf clubs, racquetball rackets, recreational items. And obviously here what I'm trying to do is, well if I'm hitting the ball with something, and less of the energy is going in to the object that does the hitting, and more of that energy goes into the ball, the balls going to go further.

Video allows students to observe the behaviors of specific materials. Seeing the ball respond differently to materials which look alike illuminates the impact of underlaying structure, making it easier to grasp the concept. Even if the chemical structures involved were depicted in a drawing, the impact of the structures to dislocation in motion is not intuitive, so actually demonstrating the behavior helps us to understand and retain the concept. This video augments the text in the course by adding another modality that enables a deeper understanding. The fact that the instructor is performing the demonstration himself encourages student engagement and increases instructor presence.

On a practical level, recording a demonstration eliminates having a large class crowd around the speaker trying to see and hear. In addition, a recording can be made of a demonstration located away from the classroom or of something that occurs rarely.

Considerations

Accessibility

  • Captions and transcripts need to be provided for videos.
  • It is also important to verbally describe what is being done.
     

Other

Videos can be uploaded directly to Canvas using the Kaltura Integration (LTI) or uploaded to YouTube or Kaltura and then placed in Canvas with an embed code.

Related Examples

active learning
video
Kaltura
YouTube

Contributor(s)

Lesson 5 Failure Mechanisms part 3 video (27:09 min)

Credit: T. Palmer © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

A presentation recorded in the studio produces a polished resource that can be used to share knowledge and content and provide an opportunity for students to review the material as often as needed to ensure comprehension. Professor Todd Palmer has recorded all his lectures for a course on Materials Science. Viewers can see the presentation and the instructor along with the laser pointer motion directing student attention. Slides are shown full screen if there is hard-to-see detail, but otherwise, the instructor is present in the video so that students can see facial expressions and gestures and form a connection with the instructor. The demonstrated intellectual mastery inspires confidence in the instructor’s knowledge. Online and hybrid course applications are obvious, but this practice can also be used in a residential course for topics that benefit from review or when an instructor is traveling. Additionally, video may be assigned for viewing outside of resident class time in order to reserve some class time for engagement in active learning.

This technique is best undertaken by dynamic presenters who create and hone lectures to present foundational information in a highly organized and inspirational format.

Considerations

Accessibility

  • Captioning is required, and transcripts allow students to read content instead of, or in addition to, viewing.  
  • Audio descriptions of the visuals might be needed if accommodation is requested.
     

Other

  • If you have a lot of content, consider breaking videos into short segments.  
  • Anything an instructor shows on a computer can be shown on the screen. For example, programming software, images, annotations or presentation software in addition to PowerPoint.    
  • Working with a videographer will produce high-quality, professional results. 

Related Examples

active learning
social presence
video

Contributor(s)

Credit: Tim Bralower © Penn State University is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

DR. TIMOTHY BRALOWER: Hi, everybody. Welcome to module 2 on recent climate. And I'm standing here in Duke Gardens. It's 2019, and if you came to Duke Gardens 12 years ago, 15 years ago, you would never see so much lush subtropical vegetation. And the vegetation has changed here because climate has changed in this region, and that is happening everywhere. And the predictions are for more severe storms, and that has already borne out with Hurricane Katrina, 2005, Hurricane Sandy, 2012, that struck New York, and Hurricane Harvey in 2017 that dumped 56 inches of rain in metro Houston.

So all of the predictions are coming true for a climate change, and this is what's being borne out in the recent climate record. I just wanted to mention one other thing. Last year was a devastating fire year in California, and drought and fires are definitely part of the prediction for global climate change in arid regions such as the US Southwest. So I think in this module, you'll learn a lot about the recent climate record and how that projects to the future of what we'll see with continued global climate change. I hope you enjoy the module.

In this example, the instructor uses a short video to introduce a lesson on recent climate change. In the video, the instructor explains how and why his surroundings (Duke Gardens) are different from what they were 12 – 15 years ago and that the result is due to recent climate change. The video gives relevance to the lesson’s objectives and the week’s material with a visual example and explanation. Because students are able to make a connection between what is seen and described in this video and what they are learning in the course, they are likely to be motivated to engage and learn.

Considerations

Accessibility

Include captions and transcripts for all videos.

Related Examples

Kaltura
YouTube

Contributor(s)

References/Resources

  • Glazier, R. A. (2016). Building rapport to improve retention and success in online classes. Journal of Political Science Education, 12(4), 437-456. doi:10.1080/15512169.2016.1155994
  • Martin, F., & Bolliger, D. U. (2018). Engagement matters: Student perceptions on the importance of engagement strategies in the online learning environment. Online Learning Journal, 22(1), 205-222. doi:10.24059/olj.v22i1.1092
  • Draus, P., Curran, M., and Trempus, M. (2014). The Influence of Instructor-Generated Video Content on Student Satisfaction with and Engagement in Asynchronous Online Classes. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. 10(2), 240-54. Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol10no2/draus_0614.pdf