Educators use multiple strategies to engage students in their coursework, including lectures, presentations, class discussions, projects, and videos. Videos are an effective and convenient medium, offering instructors the means to engage their students before, during, and even after class.
Videos make learning more accessible to students, including neurodiverse learners, by providing multi-modal input–audio, text, and animated illustrations – to make information more memorable. Such videos support educators in accommodating different learning preferences and individualizing learning.
Here are four ways you can get started with using videos in your curriculum:
1. The Flipped Classroom
Time spent in class is more effective and efficient when students arrive with some prior understanding of the subject. Ask students to watch a curated selection of videos ahead of class – known as “flipping the class” – where educators can easily share with a single link to a video “playlist.” In addition to preparing students for discussion, shifting some of the learning ahead of class allows more in-class time for application-based learning, which is shown to improve learning outcomes.
Not ready to flip your class but want to start lectures at a more advanced level of learning? Encourage students to “prime” their learning or refresh previously-learned foundational concepts. Doing this allows educators to devote less time to re-teaching foundational concepts in class, facilitates teaching more detailed, nuanced, and difficult content, and allows more time to answer student questions. Even better, by using existing videos, instructors save time and effort because they don’t have to prepare the pre-work materials.
TIP: Give new or post-vacation students the best start by assigning video-based learning for students to complete during their summer or winter breaks. It will help bridge the learning gap and get them into the right mindset before the new term begins.
2. Post-class Work
Just as videos can be helpful before attending class, curated video playlists that align with session learning objectives are also effective when used after class. As with pre-class work videos, high-quality, timely videos can save faculty time as well. If students have questions about the day’s lectures or activities, videos can help clarify concepts. If they’re already clear on the content, watching videos after class reinforces and cements their knowledge.
3. In-class Presentations and Active Lectures
Attention span is a factor in the classroom, particularly in longer sessions. Breaking up lessons into smaller “chunks” and switching pedagogies helps keep students engaged. This can be accomplished with various educational activities, including Q&A (the Socratic method), active discussions, small group activities, and team-based work.
Playing a video, or even a clip of a video, during class is another way to break up a lecture and retain student attention. Why? Aside from the change of modality from lecture to video, videos help learners visualize and internalize information with multiple neural pathways, reinforcing the information you want them to learn.
4. At-risk Student Support (and How Osmosis Can Help)
It can be tough to identify students who are academically at-risk before they fail, but instructors can begin to gather these signals with frequent low-stakes assessments. Tools like the Osmosis faculty analytics dashboard let instructors visualize student accuracy and performance on assessment items, providing early clues about challenging topics and illuminating changes in student performance and identify students who need extra help.
When staff has identified students who are at-risk or struggling to understand something, faculty, and academic support staff can prepare and share a playlist of Osmosis videos tied to the course learning objectives. Then, if students have questions about a specific concept or topic, their teacher can quickly and easily share a related video on the spot and without preparing additional materials.
Are you ready to get started teaching and learning by Osmosis? Try Osmosis and see if it’s right for you and your students. Visit www.educators.osmosis.org now to learn more and request a free trial.
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