Typology of video for teaching, learning and assessment

Remarks at the British Sociological Association conference, roundtable session (Frontiers stream), University of Manchester, 6 April 2017.

It’s worth considering the medium-specificity of video now (as distinct from conventional, passive notions of “educational” or “instructional video”). Online video, mobile media, ubiquitous connectivity. This is to say, we should consider the contemporary affordances of video, that is, “how a medium or technology affords uses to individuals” (Nagy & Neff, 2015, p. 2), either as overt affordances or “hidden affordances” (e.g., algorithms).

Video is now a vernacular medium (Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook), and should be part of our thinking about the larger questions of “visual forms of knowledge production” more broadly (I borrow here the subtitle of Joanna Drucker’s Graphesis) (Drucker, 2014). In the digital environment, curriculum, teaching and assessment have become a question of interaction design. Janet Murray, in her book Inventing the Medium, argues that interaction designers should think of all objects made with bits (e.g., games, Web pages, robots or mobile apps) as belonging to a single digital medium. She argues that designers can draw on the same palette for all digital environments: Computational procedures, user participation, navigable space, and encyclopaedic capacity (Murray, 2012).

Therefore, I propose we should think of teaching, learning and assessment as a question of interaction design (which is a topic for a whole other presentation). A lecture or seminar involves many decisions (many by default) about interaction, they are assemblages of conventions, techniques, technologies, etc. The use of video in teaching illustrates how that is already the case in contemporary practice:

I suggest there are broadly four types of video (for teaching, learning and assessment): Generated, DIY, curriculum content, and training/reference.

Generated

Video generated in the course of teaching: Lecture capture, student presentations — anything happening in a classroom. (This only applies when it’s a choice, that is, part of a teaching strategy and the design of the module. Let’s set aside the daftness of institutions imposing lecture capture by default.)

DIY (my favourite)

Teaching, learning and assessment through making. Video made for the module or in relation to it: Lecturer-produced materials (e.g., short presentations on assignment briefs, explanatory lectures), student-produced videos (e.g., video essays), audiovisual materials gathered or curated and presented by students (e.g., YT/Vimeo, online “foraged video”). Students are used to “mutual media” like this — collaborative, social, sharing.

Curriculum content

Audiovisual curriculum (“assigned viewing”). This is what I think of as conventional use of video for teaching, using selected films, documentaries, archival materials, etc. Of course, the medium has changed from film, VHS and DVD to online video, which has increased accessibility and volume. Now you might ask students to watch an online video to prepare for a seminar, rather than use teaching time to show it, and formats like video-essays are increasingly used for assessment.

Training / reference

Video increasingly functions as “just-in-time” training/support (e.g., the help menu in software), as distinguished from “up front” training/support (e.g., structured introduction to a topic, technology, software).

You see this in the habits of students, for whom YouTube is as much a source of reference as Wikipedia or the assigned curriculum. In media programmes this is especially relevant to technology and “how-to” videos (e.g., coding, software tools, cameras and other hardware). Lynda.com is a good example of a subscription-based service focused on this kind of training and reference video — it “outsources” a lot of technical software training that was previously done in workshops and labs to a searchable archive of bite-sized videos. In social sciences this is relevant to research methods and techniques, as well as more technical materials (like using SPSS, statistics, data visualisation, etc.). As a learner, myself, I’ve used a lot of recorded conference presentations on YouTube for learning specific coding tools and techniques (e.g., the PyCon 2016 channel).

There is a trend towards on-demand interactivity that looks and feels like gaming. For example, there are game-like online training resources like Codecademy: They offer structured, interactive training that feels like progressing through levels (“levelling up”), solving small problems at every step (e.g., the free intro to Python or HTML — Codecademy runs on a freemium model like a lot of software).

We’re all interaction designers

All of this points back to my earlier description of video as a vernacular medium. The means of production and use are in any mobile phone. As such, it’s on its way to becoming unremarkable, just another tool of the trade. What interests me are the pedagogical specificities of this tool: In teaching, learning and assessment we can (and should) think of online/mobile video as a digital medium in Murray’s sense: computational procedures, user participation (e.g., making video, curating), navigable space (e.g., hyperlinks, game-like interfaces, interactivity within the video in the form of choices and quizzes), encyclopaedic (searchable archive, available whenever).

References

Drucker, Johanna. 2014. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Harvard University Press.

Murray, Janet H. 2012. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. MIT Press.

Nagy, Peter, and Gina Neff. 2015. “Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory.” Social Media + Society 1 (2): 2056305115603385. doi:10.1177/2056305115603385.