(from Faculty Focus) Extending the Shelf Life of Your Instructional Videos: Six Common Pitfalls to Avoid. When instructional video is produced thoughtfully and used to promote active engagement, it can improve student motivation, learning, and performance, make content more memorable, and bring highly visual material to life. Video has other benefits as well. It allows students to watch lectures at their own pace, rewinding and re-watching as needed. It lets instructors assign lectures as homework, opening up class time for interaction. And it can reduce the total time faculty need to spend preparing and delivering the same material for different semesters or audiences. Once you’ve recorded a video, you can–theoretically–use it again and again.
I say “theoretically” because it’s not as easy as it sounds. In fact, there are a number of small mistakes that can shorten the shelf-life of video unnecessarily, limit its reusability, and compel you to re-record sooner than you’d like. Here are six strategies that can help you avoid these pitfalls and make videos that last.
