Screencast-O-Matic for Easy & Accessible Video Creation

I am the Instructional Technologist at Cañada College and I work a lot with faculty who are motivated and excited to improve their online and hybrid courses and make them more engaging for their students. One thing that gets my faculty most excited about improving their courses is being able to make videos for their students, whether it’s a short course introduction video, a set of lecture videos, or an informal check-in video.

But I also find that video can be very intimidating for those who have not yet used it . I personally was horrified at the way my voice sounded and at the facial expressions I made while recording my very first video. So horrified, in fact, that I re-recorded it approximately 56 times and then just gave up and deleted it all together. But being able to record tutorial videos is essential for the work that I do, so I tried again and kept going. And, surprisingly, I got more and more comfortable talking to my webcam over time.

Getting more comfortable with recording yourself just comes with time and practice and a lot of patience. However, the technical side of video, which includes recording, editing, and captioning, has gotten a lot easier for me since I started using Screencast-O-Matic. I started out using the Free version, which allows you to record videos up to 15 minutes in length. Then at the beginning of 2018, we purchased a site license for the paid version and it came with some very simple, yet robust editing, captioning and uploading tools that made my video workflow so much smoother. So I’m excited to share with you my recommended recording workflow using Screencast-O-Matic. If your institution does not have a site license, educators can purchase an upgraded account for a monthly price that is about the same cost as a cup of coffee (link to: https://screencast-o-matic.com/plans#solo).

Recommended Recording Workflow

I put together a Recommended Screencast Recording Work Flow and a Recommended Face-to-Camera Recording Work Flow for faculty at my college and I made the video below to demonstrate the steps. These steps allow me to make videos quickly and relatively painlessly, but feel free to experiment with other ways of making your videos until you find what works for you.


The Screencast-o-matic
features illustrated in this video are included in a Solo Deluxe account.

Additional Resources

It can be overwhelming to know how and where to start when you are ready to try making a video for the first time. Whether you are using Screencast-O-Matic to record your videos or another tool, here are my tips and areas to focus on for the different kinds of videos you may want to make.

What’s Next

It’s my hope that you feel a little more prepared to tackle video making if you’ve never done it before, that you learned something helpful if you’re a seasoned video maker. I encourage you to test out the free version of Screencast-O-Matic and get started with making videos. Or if you have another tool at your college or one that you’re familiar with, jump in and experiment with that. The tool you use is not as important as putting the time and energy into learning and practicing the skill of video making.

Leave a comment below, or contact me via email at hughesa@smccd.edu or on Twitter, if you have any questions. Feel free to even just share your thoughts and experience with making videos, I’d love to hear how you’re doing!

Finding Your Regional Distance Education Community

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What if you could meet regularly with peers from neighboring community colleges to share solutions and ideas about online education?  For faculty and staff at California community colleges located in southern border counties, this wish has come true.

The San Diego/ Imperial County Community College Association (SDICCCA) has an Instructional Services subcommittee on Distance Education that was founded in late 2012.  The subcommittee is made up of Distance Education representatives from nine community colleges in the San Diego and Imperial County area.  SDICCA members meet at the San Diego Community College District offices on the first Friday of each month. Together, we discuss and provide leadership on DE issues such as practices for supporting and preparing faculty and students, strategies for improving student retention and success, as well as effective practices for meeting accreditation requirements and state/national distance education regulations.

Finding My Community 

As the new DE Coordinator for Palomar College, I just started attending these SDICCA meetings this year and I have learned so much from the other long-time members of the group.  For example, since community colleges are making compliance with accessibility laws and regulations a big priority this year, we have explored ideas for handling vendor software that is out of compliance.  Here are a problem and proposed solution that I have taken away from my experiences. Many mathematics instructors use MyMathLab in their online classes and, currently, MyMathLab does not meet the minimum acceptable standards for accessibility.  SDICCCA members shared with the group other software that may be substituted such as Knewton or MyOpenMath, which has some accessibility issues but not as many as MyMathLab.

In our last meeting, each college DE representative shared something about the various software packages they were using to support DE classes.  Together, we discovered:

In addition to discussions around key themes, members share concerns about DE issues, report back to each other on what is happening at the state level, and they give an annual presentation to administrators to help them understand the benefits of online education, as well as the challenges we confront in expanding this teaching modality.

I highly recommend that other regional community colleges form DE groups of their own.  The sharing of ideas, concerns, and technology with each other are extremely beneficial! 

From Reluctant to Ready: The Power of Support for New Online Teachers

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I’ve been teaching in the classroom full-time for 17 years and I feel things are shifting.  One of the classes I love to teach has had an enrollment drop as more online classes have been added.   I’ve heard many colleagues over the years complain about their online students and how they aren’t prepared.  I’ve also had colleagues who started teaching online years ago and set up their courses to do the absolute minimal.  For me, part of the joy of teaching is being with people and watching my students’ eyes light up when they get “it.”  These are some of the reasons why I really didn’t think online teaching would ever be for me.

Adapting to Change

I feel certain the pendulum will at some point swing back to students wanting to be in the classroom more than online, but I’m not sure when that will happen.  I do know that online provides opportunities for many students who can’t be in a traditional classroom and I love the idea of making classes accessible to them.  The bottom line is I knew if I didn’t jump into online teaching now then I was closing the door to learning a different style of teaching.  With a desire to teach for another 17 years, I thought it was too soon to not change with the times.

It’s accurate to put me in the “reluctant online teacher” category.  I am tired of the grind of the commute which continues to get worse every year and I see how teaching online will reduce the hours in my car.  Therefore, I decided I was going to give online teaching a real chance.  If I was going to take the plunge to build an online course I was going to make THE BEST course I possibly could, and I was going to do it the right way the first time.

Finding Support with the Online Education Initiative

My college is a member of the California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative (OEI). As a faculty of an OEI college, I have the opportunity to teach online courses through the Course Exchange, which reserves a specified number of spots in my class to students at other CA community colleges. In order to be in the Course Exchange, however, I first needed to design my course and align it with the OEI Course Design Rubric. I thought if my course could get approval for the Course Exchange, then I would never have to worry about enrollment for my online course.

Therefore, I signed up for the OEI Course Design Academy online information meeting.  During the call, it was evident to me that many of the faculty in attendance had a long way to go before we would be ready for the Course Exchange.  More than a handful of us on the call had never taught an online class. To get started, we needed to learn how to develop a course before even thinking about the Course Exchange.  So I decided to enroll in an @ONE’s Online Teaching and Design (OTD), a 12-week, online course, to learn the ins and outs of online course design and teaching.

I took this course as if my life depended on it.  At about week 7 of the course, I submitted my online course for a peer review, which was the first step in getting my course in the Course Exchange.  I worked hard to develop a curriculum (I hadn’t taught this particular course in many years and I decided to build the content myself versus use a textbook that would cost the students a lot of money) and setup my Canvas pages. I used all the information I had learned so far in my OTD course and put it into my own course.  I was anxious to hear back from the OEI course review team.  A colleague of mine who already had a course in the Course Exchange told me not to worry. I was told that I would get a long list of things that still need to be done with my course, but the instructional designer would help me through it.

Invaluable Peer Feedback

The feedback from the review team, comprised of Aloha Sargent, a faculty member from Cabrillo College and @ONE course facilitator, and Helen Graves, an instructional designer with @ONE and the OEI, was so incredibly encouraging that it motivated me to make the changes.  Naively, I didn’t realize how much really needed to get done.  However, once I started the process, I knew I really was developing the best course I possibly could.  Helen Graves, my instructional designer, could not have been more supportive, encouraging, thoughtful or helpful.

Helen and I had a weekly one hour Zoom conference.  Without her, I cannot imagine how I would have developed a course I would be so proud of.  She took a tremendous amount of time going through my course with me and explaining how to make it accessible for all kinds of learners.  Along the way, she taught me how to use html code to do some very cool things in Canvas and help chunk the information into bite size bits.  As a result, my content was more clear and could be understood by more learners. Helen was incredibly patient and even made quick little videos during the week to show me how to do various things within my modules.  At times, she referred to her “A Team” colleagues who would magically and mysteriously help me improve my course’s 508 accessibility compliance.  I liked to imagine Mr. T behind the scenes helping with accessibility, but I think the real hero on the A Team for my course was Marisa McNees.

I’m Ready

Because of the OEI Course Exchange Process, I was able to make a course that I’m excited to teach. I am confident that I will have the chance to build a community and take care of my students in an online setting.  I imagine that it will be fulfilling for my students and for me.  I’m extremely appreciative of the instructional design and accessibility support available to me through the OEI , so I could continue to grow as a teacher.  This process not only made my online course better, it made me reevaluate how I share information in my face-to-face course and make it better, as well.  In the end, it felt like an indulgence to have someone take the time to give considered and thoughtful feedback and be as excited as me about the course I built.

 

 

Building Relationships with Faculty as an Instructional Designer

Instructional Designer infographic pointing out the diverse roles of an ID

My office door with an illustration by Robert Kilman from the Arizona State University website TeachOnline

When I began my position as the Instructional Designer in Distance Education at Santa Rosa Junior College (SRJC) in the Fall of 2015, my new supervisor printed the illustration shown in the photo above and gave it to me. I taped it to my office door. Who wouldn’t like to be depicted as a fashionable superhero-explorer with a split personality? It’s also a pretty good representation of an action-packed job that marries creative thinking with technical problem-solving. Flexing different parts of my brain throughout the day keeps me excited about my work and on my toes.

Among the many roles I play, the one I reflect upon the most is Relationship Builder. The caption for the illustration states: “We are skilled at building relationships and rapport with faculty, staff, and clients. There is the potential for a lot of emotion around what we do.” The emotion was immediately evident to me at SRJC. My position was created at the same time that our college adopted Canvas to replace Moodle and a home-grown system called CATE. Emotions were loud and clear: many faculty felt overwhelmed by the transition, especially when it meant significantly reorganizing course materials to accommodate the Canvas interface.

Fortunately, many of those faculty attended our in-person Canvas workshops and appointments for help, and I was able to calm nerves by listening carefully to their concerns and providing support. I also encouraged faculty to share problems and solutions with each other. Building face-to-face relationships came easily to me and helped faculty make the transition.

Now that the transition to Canvas is complete, fewer faculty attend our in-person workshops and more often send me emails and enroll in my online courses and programs. I am happy to provide support remotely, but I find that building meaningful relationships with new faculty now requires more deliberate planning and cultivation. I’ll share two of my strategies:

  1. I now use ConferZoom to “meet” new faculty who take our Online Special Expertise certificate training, a six-week online course that I teach in Canvas. I offer Zoom sessions each week, and participants are required to attend at least one session. The stated purpose of this requirement is for faculty to experience the Zoom interface as a teaching tool, but I also value the sessions for relationship building. Conversations take off into many directions, just as they do in person. Sometimes the encounters are even more personal than they would be in person --I’ve met more than a few babies, kids, and pets through Zoom! I’ve also invited guests to join us, including @ONE’s Michelle Pacansky-Brock and Lené Whitley Putz.Zoom session require advance planning (although on occasion I launch Zoom screen-sharing for support calls). For the Online Special Expertise sessions, I survey participants at the start of each course to determine everyone’s availability. I then post session dates as ungraded Assignments in Canvas so the “due dates” appear in Modules, on the Calendar, and in the To Do list. I set up Outlook meetings as a reminder. I also make appointments with faculty who can’t make the sessions, and I note session attendance in Grades to be sure everyone participates. Building new relationships makes it worth the effort.
  2.  I interview faculty for my Online Faculty Spotlight video series, which I post on our DE Blog and on YouTube. Response to the series has been very enthusiastic because a common request I hear from faculty who are new to online teaching is to see example Canvas courses. I ask the faculty I interview to imagine they are sharing their course with a colleague who has never taught online before. It’s the type of interaction that might happen informally in offices or workshops, but many of our adjunct faculty miss out on those opportunities for interaction.Some faculty I invite for interviews are hesitant to be recorded at first, but I sit next to them at my computer and we have a conversation while recording with Screencast-o-matic. I promise to edit out anything embarrassing to put them at ease. I ask them to give me a “tour” of their course and explain their teaching goals and strategies. I usually include the webcam so it’s clear who is talking. The videos foster relationships among faculty who may never meet otherwise.

My future plans, if I ever find the time, is to do a podcast. The only slack time I have during the day is lunch, so perhaps I’ll call it “Lunch with Liz at SRJC.” I won’t pull off something as slick as Teaching in Higher Ed while eating, so perhaps I’ll have informal lunch conversations with faculty about kids, pets, or favorite fonts. I keep meaning to get a Helvetica Forever t-shirt.

Helvetica Forever t-shirt

 

Learn more about the Robert Kilman's Instructional Designer infographic.