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Guideline 1
Will video achieve your instructional goals?

Student-Centered Learning Objectives

Before we can determine your video's suitability to your instructional goals for students, we must have these instructional goals clearly in view. Have you articulated your learning objectives in terms of how the student will demonstrate attainment of them? What evidence of learning will satisfy you that an adequate kind and level of learning has taken place? Bear in mind that the higher-level objectives we often expect can only be achieved once lower-level objectives have been attained, like rungs on a ladder.

A fuller discussion of properly written learning objectives is beyond the scope of this exhibit. See Bloom’s Taxonomy and writing learning objectives for guidance.

Learning Objectives-Strategy Match

Ensure that a video lecture is the best instructional strategy for your objectives. Here are just a few examples of what lecture video does and does not do well instructionally, broadly speaking:

Present Objectives Early

Early in the video, make the connection between the relevant learning objectives and the video explicit. Bring your objectives into the video itself, at least within the first minute.

Track Student Usage (if possible)

This guideline is entirely dependent on the data capture capabilities of the technology where your video resides, and so may not always be possible. But, if available, this data is vital for "closing the instructional loop" and shedding light on student use of your video.

• How many students are watching the video is its entirety?
• Do they watch it all at once, or in multiple sessions?
• What buttons do they click in the video player? Do they rewind to review?

The Office of Digital Learning may be able to help with tracking student usage of your video.

Assess Student Comprehension

This is an especially important consideration, often missed. Watching a video is an essentially passive activity. Did they understand your explanations? Did they connect concepts and relationships correctly? Are they clear on the major points, or did they "major on the minors"? Frankly, without some mechanism to find out, you don't know and neither do they. What can you do?

• At selected points in the video, interject a "check your understanding" question before going further. Applications like HAX and H5P allow you to author and associate a wide range of question types with your video.
• Use an ungraded Canvas quiz activity immediately following the video.
• Use a poll to get the pulse of the class and then provide reaction/clarification.

Whatever assessment method you use, be sure that it aligns with the learning objectives you identified previously.

Relate to Class Discussion (Optional)

If discussion is important in your course, what role does video play in that discussion? The video should be located together with the associated discussion forum.

Consider Managed Release of Content

Determine how you will make your video lectures available to students:

• All at once? Weekly?
• Unit by unit?
• Only upon completion of other content?

A managed release of content is often beneficial to students, as it conveys a sense of course pace and keeps them from feeling overwhelmed. If you do not want to release all content at once, consider making an additional lesson (beyond the current lesson) available to allow your faster students to work ahead at least a bit.

Integrate Video into the Course

Consider how the video will be integrated with the rest of the course components. Your lecture video is only one activity in a larger learning sequence, which has implications for where you place your video links.

• Will the links be listed sequentially?
• Will they be centralized, distributed throughout the course, or both?
• Will other content be associated with the video, such as a note-taking template, additional readings, or an assignment?

Guideline 2
Determine the typical lecture video duration.

Shorter is Better

Across studies, research consistently shows that shorter duration associates with higher completion and improved retention. Specifically, somewhere between 6-12 minutes is ideal , with 15 minutes being the maximum.

Organize Content into Narrow, Specific Topics

When chunking down a longer video, use narrower, more specific topics. For example, instead of one video named "Ancient Rome", break the video down into a series of three: "Why Did Rome Rise?", "Tracing Roman Design Features", and "Rome's Relationship to Nature."

Make the Viewing Sequence Clear

When multiple videos are best viewed in a particular sequence, make that sequence clear through sequential numbering of the video titles themselves.

Using our Rome example as the third lesson in a course, those become "3.1 Why Did Rome Rise?", "3.2 Tracing Roman Design Features", and "3.3 Rome's Relationship to Nature."

Guideline 3
Prepare a script.

Tip for Easier Script Creation

Writing a script is strongly encouraged, and pays a number of dividends in quality and process efficiency.

If scriptwriting seems daunting to you, find an easier approach.  Process tip : Generate a first draft quickly by lecturing aloud while using voice-to-text application to generate the text. You can use Google voice-to-text or an app on your phone to do this. With a rough draft in hand, it becomes much easier to refine it.

Script Your Actions as Well as Your Words

Another benefit of scripting: it helps you to identify the visuals you will need, and you can insert bracketed comments [CLICK] to remind you when to carry out your actions.

Leverage Your Time and Effort

Writing a script is an investment of time and effort, so leverage that investment wisely. Your script and slide notes can be used to create transcripts, closed captioning, and note-taking handouts.

Script Student Interaction with Content

Identify important junctures where students need to be clear and tracking with you correctly before proceeding. Also consider transitions to new topics, and increasing conceptual complexity. Before seeing additional content, students need an opportunity to check their comprehension, reflect, and consolidate what they have been learning with what they already know.

As discussed above, build in pauses in your script to pose questions to them and suggest they pause the video, or use a tool to pose multiple choice and other types of questions.

Rehearse before Recording

Rehearsing your presentation is the last step in refining your script from nearly final to truly final. In small ways, phrasing that seemed fine on the written page suddenly becomes awkward when spoken, or you realize the need to add a visual or make a small sequence change. Making these corrections now is much easier than when recording. If possible, include a small audience to elicit their feedback.

Guideline 4
Plan for legality and accessibility.

Document Source Information in the Moment

Finding great resources to include in your presentation—text, images, audio, video—is quite easy, especially from the Web. But for copyright compliance and proper citation, you will need a system for retaining relevant information regarding your source. You can use a tool intended for the purpose like Zotero , or just create a spreadsheet if you prefer. Consider capturing at least the following:

• Source: URL or other location where you found the content.
• Citation Info: For example, for an image you would want to capture the image creator's name, image title, date of creation, date posted online, date of access, institution where located, website or database name.
• Accessibility Info: Images and media will need alternative text, captions, descriptive text, etc. Better to write and store this information together with the copyright information.

Document Copyright Clearance Required

A full treatment of copyright compliance is beyond the scope here; see the resource links below. When incorporating content you didn't create (images, video, audio, text, etc.), consider the copyright implications for each piece of content:

• Is the content in the public domain or expressly copyright-free?
• Would your use be a legitimate fair use of copyrighted content? See the Penn State Fair Use guidelines.
• Do you need to request any permissions? Allow sufficient time for this process to finish.
• Is there a cost for licensing? Would our library license it?
• If Creative Commons Licensing is indicated, follow the specific usage and citation guidelines provided.

Here are a few links to help you navigate copyright:

• Penn State Copyright Basics
• Penn State Fair Use guidelines
• Locating and Using Images for Presentations and Coursework (Purdue University)
• Citing Sources (UCLA)

Consider Your Options

What Creative Commons Licensing would you apply to your content?

Plan for Accessibility Also

Given that we are dealing with a video in the end, accessibility requirements would come down to three things: 

• Providing a closed caption text file that the video player can display as the video plays (for those who have hearing disabilities, or who prefer text to audio)
• Supplying a complete text transcript of the audio for download
• Providing a written description of each shot in the video

See the University Accessibility site for more detailed information. Also see this guide for the description of visual information in a video.