Survey: Video Is Now Integral to Higher Education
Young adults watch about 12 hours of online video per week, a survey from Defy Media found. So it’s not surprising that video has made its way into universities.
According to “The State of Video in Education,” a recent annual survey by Kaltura, 86 percent of educators use video in their classrooms.
Kaltura, maker of an open-source video platform, asked 1,500 educators, IT professionals, administrators and students about the use of video at their institutions. Largely, they found video is used for webcasting on-campus events (59 percent), marketing and communications projects (55 percent), webcasting classes and lecture capture (51 percent), and during the admissions process (30 percent). Educators themselves produce about 37 percent of these videos.
“If proof were needed that video is now mainstream in education, then this is it,” Ron Yekutiel, chairman and CEO of Kaltura, told eCampus News. “Those institutions that do not yet have a comprehensive video strategy in place for the new academic year risk being left behind.”
Here are some of the creative ways educators and administrators in using this visual tool on campus:
New Spin on Webcasting and Lecture Capture
As early as 2013, Campus Technology reported on professors who strived to make traditional lecture capture more engaging.
Rob Zdrojewski, an adjunct professor at Canisius College, talked about the innovative “two-way screencasting” approach he uses to make lecture capture more dynamic.
In Zdrojewski’s approach, students can make comments during the lecture video, with corresponding alerts sent to teachers and fellow students. Also, rather than text, Zdrojewski says, students can insert their own videos into the timeline of the lecture.
“It’s a really neat way to have two-way conversations that are not limited just to what happens in class,” says Zdrojewski.
More recently, professors have made use of the Lightboard, a pane of glass in a metal frame with embedded LED lights, preset lighting and a camera that records note-taking.
Created by Professor Michael Peshkin at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, the Lightboard has been installed at 30 educational institutions since 2014, an article on Northwestern’s website reports.
“I created the Lightboard so that I can get these small video lectures to my students as they need them without a lot of production overhead, but also, with training, allow any faculty member or student to produce their own,” says Peshkin.
Video as a Dynamic Tool for Marketing and Admissions
This year, NPR reported that some universities are using video-based admissions platforms for international student interviews to get a better sense of the students outside of their essays.
NPR also reported on a startup called YouVisit that lets students take interactive campus video tours. CEO Abi Mandelbaum told NPR he founded YouVisit because he and his overseas friends wish they had had such a tool as prospective students.
“We wanted to come to the U.S., but selecting from the thousands of colleges, it’s a daunting experience,” Mandelbaum told NPR.
