Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

This semester I’m teaching a graduate seminar on education and technology for Georgetown University. Over the next two months, I’ll share the experience and highlights in a series of columns for EdSurge with highlights from the course. This is part 3. Read part 1 and part 2.

Digital video has taken the world by storm. Netflix is busy changing television and movies. YouTube may be humanity’s largest collaborative cultural project, aggregating an astonishing amount of user-generated content. The Google-owned service is widely used that it may already soak up more than a third of all mobile traffic.

You can’t watch a video like you read a book; the modalities couldn’t be much more different.

On the surface level a video uses light, color, sound, and moving images, with the potential for adding text and shape and color and light filters as overlays to communicate ideas, while the most basic text structures use alphanumeric symbols, paragraph and sentence structure, and an assortment of text features (e.g., white space, headings and subheadings, fonts, etc.) to convey their message.

I have been making videos for about three years now and am convinced of the benefits.  I have run professional development sessions at my school over the years.  They have been well received and teachers have been keen to start making videos too.  However, in most cases, teachers haven’t started.  The learning curve and fear of recording their voice and face create significant inertia for many teachers.

An annual survey on video in higher education found that more than half of the institutions who responded now use a video solution integrated into their Learning Management System. The figure is up 6% from 46% last year. In addition, three quarters of students in higher education use video in their assignments, up 4% on last year’s figure of 71%.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate for my students to learn from video.”
—Me (until a month ago)

I’ve been afraid to have my class learn from video for most of my career. I’ve told myself, “You can’t replace good whole group instruction.” I’ve advocated vehemently for teaching in front of the class for years.

We recently held a webinar, “The Latest Word on Video in Education: Get the 2017 Survey Results,” to review the results of the State of Video in Education 2017. But during the webinar, we also polled our attendees. So we decided to share the results of that, as well!