By Andy Bloor (Senior Lecturer in Schools Direct and FE)
Good online sessions will often use recordings such as videos or music. When presenting these to students though there is a danger that there can be lag (where the picture or sound appears to jerk along or is mismatched) and at worse it can end up crashing a lecturer’s internet connection!
The best way to get your students to engage with media is to give it to them in a way they can access it directly, rather than streaming it through the virtual classroom software e.g. Collaborate.
For example: you have a YouTube video you want your students to watch and comment on. The video is 7 minutes long. In this case, best practice would be to give students the link and then give them 10 minutes (the 7 minute video plus time for it to load) and stop the session whilst they look at the video on their own. Obviously, the video could be provided to watch before or after the session as an asynchronous learning resource, but sometimes it might be necessary for students to view the content at a certain time during a synchronous online session.
If you have any queries about this or would like more support with shaping effective online sessions, please contact tel@derby.ac.uk
The other thing that works well is to record the YouTube in advance and then import this into ppt. Collaborate doesn’t like video so do need to share application. This also allows the video to be trimmed if don’t want to use the whole thing.