What is it?
To move your lectures online, you can create a video lecture based on slides. First, create your presentation, with Microsoft Powerpoint or you preferred presentation software, then video-record yourself while presenting it. One way to do that is by using the presentation software’s recording tool. Alternatively, if you need to show other material along with your slides — your Desktop perhaps or Web content — there are any number of free screen recorders available which allow recordings to be saved in MP4 format. Common examples include Web Launch Recorder, Debut Video Capture and ShareX.
Benefits of e-learning
- Good for explaining more ABSTRACT & THEORETICAL CONCEPTS such as grammar structures.
- Increases STUDENT AVAILABILITY. Students can access video lectures at any time.
- Videos can be paused or stopped as many times as students like. This helps with note-taking and information retention.
- Videos work perfectly with the flipped classroom approach as students can study the recorded lecture in their own time while using the live online class to gain insights into the lecture content.
You can also create presentations and give them live during your synchronous sessions with students. In this case, a good way to proceed is to record your live class so that students who did not attend will be able to access it later. All popular LMS and web-conference tools offer such a recording option and allow you to save your recorded class as a downloadable MP4 file. Your recorded lecture therefore becomes an efficient STUDY TOOL which students can access at any time during the duration of the course or module.
Tips for giving an effective online lecture
When starting off with e-learning it is very common to think that one should simply deliver an online lecture (either live or recorded as a video) by talking over the slides online. Nothing could be more wrong! As we saw in Lesson 1, online learning environments lacks important nonverbal communication elements like eye-contact or body language which usually help students stay focused and guide them throughout the content of the lesson. Below are some tips that may help you fill these gaps:
- Include visuals. Images, graphs and memes have a powerful impact on students’ concentration. They give context to the information presented and help the students both understand and retain the information delivered. This also explains why it’s important to deliver your lecture content as a video and not just as an audio podcast.
- Draw attention with your tone of voice, facial expressions and body language. Do this in live classes as well as in video recordings. This guides students towards the relevant information. Alternatively use colourful forms like arrows, circles etc. to guide them.
- Include interactive elements such as polls, surveys, dilemmas and multiple-choice questions. Also, filling-the-gap activities that require continuous and immediate responses from students. Interesting apps to create polls and surveys include Mentimer and Polleverywhere.