Author: Aaron Bannasch

Estimating How Long it Takes to Make a Video

A fairly common question for anyone involved in making videos is “How long will it take?” A Venn Diagram triad is sometimes drawn in response to this question, it includes words like: Good, Fast, and Cheap. “Pick any two.” So when estimating how long a video will take to make (and in some cases also how long a video should be), I use that framework along with some simple tools and prior experiences to generate a reasonably accurate estimate. While there isn’t a simple formula, I’ll take you through some easily repeatable steps in this post that will help you


Behind the Scenes of a DL Video

While you can use a variety of tools to produce an instructional video, a video with high production value still takes some careful planning and expert use of advanced production equipment. A recent video production in Abbott Hall required an alternative setting to the DL Studio, and since one of our conference rooms was recently upgraded with echo dampening acoustic panels it made for the perfect location to set up a temporary studio environment. The value of video for establishing instructor presence and to increase student learning by balancing cognitive load through delivery of information across forms of media is well


Selecting a Video Style

What type of video should I make? If you arrived at this blog post hoping for a prescriptive answer to that question, you won’t find it here. Instead you will find a framework for including video in your online course, a framework to help you focus your course development efforts by narrowing the process of making a video down to three main sequences of events. Begin by identifying the need for a video solution The proliferation of video-enabled devices, as well as the tradition of capturing lecture for use in online courses, may have set up the expectation that you


Help Your Students Make Better Virtual Presentations

Common activities that occur in many professional and classroom settings, like giving a presentation, don’t always work in a distance learning environment in the ways we would expect. Differences in technology platforms can make the fairly simple process of talking and showing something to a group a difficult task. Fortunately, many students today frequently communicate through digital media and the amount of available options continues to grow. Humans are a species that uniquely use language to imagine and create narratives. Throughout our evolution we have developed ways to share these with each other that traverse time and place. This blog post will cover a


Offline Access to Course Materials

In December, Canvas announced a new feature to download course materials in EPUB format for viewing as an ebook. The feature is still in beta testing and as of the publish date of this blog post Canvas has not announced a date to move the feature out of beta. The feature will be useful for reading content offline, but does not allow interactions with the course material in the same way the fully online mobile app and browser based Canvas interfaces do. For example, you can navigate a course’s basic structure and read content pages, announcements, assignment instructions, or other static content in