Instructional videos are a great tool to assist students to gain knowledge on complex technical skills by using a “how to” format. These types of videos are popular on YouTube. Viewers can follow a step by step guide to achieve a certain task allowing for pausing and review.
Instructional videos are a way of providing a reusable resources for your students to watch and understand core skills required. These videos are best shared in a flipped teaching approach: given to the students before a session to watch, and then in the session they can then build up on any further questions from viewing the video.
Videos of this nature are ideally suited to showing practical demonstrations of a task or theory. The success of this kind of video, to explain both basic and complex concepts, is evident by the numerous popular examples on YouTube. They can enable students to gain an understanding of what is required in the industry once they graduate. Instructional videos can be created in a number of ways. Videos can have a presenter demonstrating the chosen content, a voiceover that appears over slides, physical or visual demonstrations or even as animation.
Most viewed instructional videos on YouTube consist of a single shot of the person doing the instruction while talking it through to the audience. This can be done with a single camera or iPad on a tripod quite easily be done in a laboratory, classroom, studio or workshops. Instructional videos can also be created from your desktop using screen capture or a webcam using Panopto.
If any academic staff would like more advice and guidance on how to create an instructional video please contact tel@derby.ac.uk