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Building Student Engagement with an Introductory Video

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.

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