[GrahamRGibbs]

Elizabeth,

to add to your point about just-in-time videos, if what you are doing, day in, day out, is using software or websites and explaining the same things to students then using a tool like Camtasia makes a lot of sense. As you say, it is easy to storyboard what you need and your own facility with the software makes it easy to do the activities that are recorded without mistakes and retakes. I found this when I made a short video with Camtasia on the use of NVivo, software that is used to support qualitative analysis. I use the software a lot and I teach it too so it was easy to record a short session explaining some of the ways of using it.

But… I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I couldn’t stop myself improving the recording using zoom ins, call outs and highlighting. But for your just-in-time use all that is probably unnecessary.

This is comparable software for the iPad called ‘Explain Everything’ that records what you are doing on the screen. It does not record software use like Camtasia, but you can import images and PowerPoint slides and then talk about them and type, write and draw on the screen – something that’s much harder to do with Camtasia (unless you have a graphics tablet).

[GrahamRGibbs]

Phil,

that’s a good point about the diminishing discoverability of resources as twitter and blog mentions decline. I guess that’s why we need good quality repositories with good search mechanisms and, above all, properly written and well-curated meta data.

Nevertheless, as I said before, in the end you have to spend time looking at the resources in detail. In fact I suspect this is a matter of academic and educational pride. As teachers we feel we have to ‘approve’ the materials we use or at least use it in a context which we can control so that students can give it an appropriate critical appraisal. In the end, I think this is a good thing. Students know that that is what we are doing and they know that what we recommend is worth looking at and using. Essentially everything we do with and think about text books and research articles and how we recommend them is true of other educational resources.

[GrahamRGibbs]

Rachel,

you make a good point about allowing “yourself time to explore and experiment with the different platforms”. I suspect one of the reasons our focus group participants liked Google was that they were familiar with it. The more you spend time with a system the better you understand how it works and the better results you can get with it. Sadly, not all systems are the same in how they operate.

My search of iTunesU was for material on social research methods and one of the constant problems I come up against in search engines here is that such a topic is cross disciplinary. That’s why I disliked Jorum at the start (it’s got a lot better now). It was excessively focused on the Jacs discipline codes and very poor on the free text (and meta data) searches.

Another issue with iTunesU is the reusablility of the material. I can find hour long lectures on, say, questionnaire design, but I only want to use a small section of it and there is no easy way of cutting out what is needed and it is not clear if that is legitimate. In fact it’s not simple to find the licensing conditions of resources. This may also be a consequence of the fact that many of the materials on iTunesU are courseware. Hence the hour long audio recording of a lecture on questionnaire design. In my view that makes them much harder to repurpose or reuse on my teaching.

[GrahamRGibbs]

John,

the figures after each source are the percentages. So the next most used was Your Libraries’ digital resources (such as e-Books) at 75% of those who said they used such resources in their teaching. Other popular ones were Other courses on your Institution’s VLE (such as Blackboard) at 55% and Professional body website: at 42%. (N.B. respondents could tick more than one source.) The ‘Other’ category was only 3 respondents and one of those mentioned a discipline specific resource which is on the HEA resources site and one mentioned materials they had themselves created. So nothing surprising there

[GrahamRGibbs]

Sancha,

your last point, about not counting as an academic resource, reminded me that there is a general issue of how we – and how we teach students to – cite learning resources. I see no reason why they should not cite videos etc. if it is good quality material. I’ve started putting citation information on the pages of written resources of my OnlineQDA website, but I’ve not done this for videos and I’ve never seen it done on YouTube. But why not? We probably need to teach students to apply the same discrimination to the wide range of learning resources as we do to printed materials and to cite them following the same principles (Author, Title, place of production, date etc.) as we use for journal papers, books etc.

Graham

(Still getting terrible scores on my Helvetica vs Arial app)

[GrahamRGibbs]

Elizabeth,

I suspect there is more relevant material on YouTube than you found. In my experience it is very important  when uploading videos to YouTube to make sure the description, title and meta data are done properly and informatively. As there are now lots of universities putting up materials on YouTube to support student learning and research, I would guess there there will be videos on using bibliographic search tools. But not everyone is good at writing metadata and those putting up materials from universities are not to be relied on.

I notice you didn’t use Google. I just did a quick Google search using the search string “YouTube boolean search” and found loads of relevant videos.

The other thing you find now is that creators of video material may have their own websites where, if you know to look there, you can find the resources, but they also put the same videos on YouTube too. In fact, I now do this the other way round. Putting stuff on YouTube is so easy I do this first and then embed the video in my website or in the VLE pages I run.

[GrahamRGibbs]

Angela, re your point about embedding links within the VLE. I’ve had some experience with this and I think there are issues that the community needs to think about.

First, most of the resources are from YouTube and I use the embed code from YouTube to put them on the pages in our VLE (Blackboard). The problem with this is that not every academic will be able to do this. There is a Blackboard supported way of doing this but it’s not a neat as embedding and besides it requires that you find the resource from within Blackboard (even if you already have it in YouTube).

Second, I found this year that a lot of the embedding was failing, I think, because the Blackboard code had been upgraded so that the old embed code didn’t work. In one or two cases the video had also been withdrawn from YouTube. I had to do a lot of work fixing this.

This leads to the longer term issue of permanence. You can’t rely on links remaining for any time. Stuff gets moved and deleted all the time – as anyone who runs a website knows, links are always breaking. There has been little discussion in the literature about how do deal with this. Should we be downloading the resources to our VLE – not an easy thing with YouTube videos and in the case of some re-usable learning resources, impossible? If the resource has a CC licence this is at least legitimate. Over the years I’ve had experience of things disappearing before I had a chance to get a copy. Sometimes thing go for understandable copyright reasons. But there are other reasons too. For example, one of my YouTube videos was imperfect. A user wrote to me to say that there was not sound on it. Turned out it was only on one of the two stereo channels and they were listening to the one with no sound! So I recreated the video with proper sound in both channels and re-uploaded it. But there was not easy way to replace the original (and that was coming up high in the search results because of the number of views) so I kept both old an new versions (with a link for the old to the new). But at some point I’ll want to delete the old version and then any links to it will break.

[GrahamRGibbs]

Tim,

I’m a fan of Y0uTube and there is some very good material there but like you I find lots of stuff that I have doubts about sharing with students. I show some videos in lectures. In one case the session is on thinking about and planning the final year pr0ject. I’ve found videos from the Stride project very good and I link to them from our VLE and I use one video in the lecture. However, my students are undergraduates in criminology, sociology and behavioural science,whereas the students talking about their projects in the Stride video are postgraduates in education (and often older students too). But the great thing about using them in a lecture is that you can explain this to the students and even stop the video to explain a point or recontextualise it for the different disciplines.

[GrahamRGibbs]

Imogen, a really interesting and detailed and thoughtful set of comments on your experience. I certainly like your comment about YouTube – “it rocks!”. That’s certainly my experience.

On an HEA OER phase 2 project a year or so ago, we did some work with some focus groups on how they looked for resources. Overwhelming we found people preferred the Google interface to that provided by Jorum, Merlot and Humbase. And that was not only because the search engine was well optimised but because there was enough information showing against each find for them to decide whether to go look in more detail at the resource. My experience is that in the end you cannot avoid watching or listening (or reading) the resource all the way through before it gets used or given to students. So what you need is a way of filtering down finds very quickly to just the few that look good and relevant. Google clearly have a lot of experience of doing that! I think YouTube does this well too as the resources are often short (and YouTube tells you how long they are) and you can watch them easily and rapidly.

I have to say that I’ve been less impressed with iTunes – except for one fabulous video that the Open University produced – but which they then withdrew! I like your good hints on how to search iTunes. It’s also worth bearing in mind that (unlike YouTube) when you subscribe to something on iTunes it is actually downloaded to your hard disk. So I actually found I had a copy of the withdrawn video. Now, of course, I’m not sure about the ethics of using it. (It doesn’t have a CC license)

The one that disappoints me most is the HEA resource. One of my big OER projects was an NTF project funded by the HEA, yet finding the wealth of video, audio and textual materials that we produced and that is openly available with CC license on our website  is almost impossible with the HEA search facility. It appears only as a funded project with no mention of the resources themselves. Memo to self – I must badger the HEA to change this.

[GrahamRGibbs]

I recently asked a question about where people found electronic resources for their teaching when I surveyed HE teachers of qualitative social research methods. Of those who said they used electronic resources in their teaching, 84% – the biggest single group – used YouTube. There’s clearly some very good stuff there. I have used YouTube videos in my lectures and as supplementary resources for students learning research methods. Some made by others and some I’ve done myself. It helps when you find popular authors, such as Andy Field putting videos on YouTube.

If you are interested, the other results in the questionnaire are below. The question was, if you use third party/online resources in your teaching where do you get them from? (figures are percentages of those using resources)

Other courses on your Institution’s VLE (such as Blackboard): 
55

Your Libraries’ digital resources (such as e-Books): 
75

National educational repository (such as JORUM): 
14

Discipline specific website (such as OnlineQDA.hud.ac.uk): 
28

Corporate website: 
23

Another Institution’s website / VLE: 
19

MOOC / opencourseware (such as edShare): 
0

Open access repository (such as OpenLearn): 
14

iTunesU: 
14

YouTube: 
84

BUFVC: 
2

Box of Broadcasts: 
14

Flickr: 
6

Professional body website: 
42

HEA website: 
33

Other (please specify): 
5

[GrahamRGibbs]

Your comments echo my experience when looking for resources. I’ve ‘wasted’ hours looking through Jorum and Merlot and been put off by some of the low quality of the material I found. The main issue here was that there wasn’t enough reliable and detailed description and meta data to make a judgement about the resource without downloading it and spending time looking at it. The need to spend time looking at the material is still true for YouTube, but I have found that getting to the video resource is very quick, and, as you say, the videos are often quite short. But even more importantly, you know how long they are before you start. I also think the arrangement into channels on YouTube is helpful. Once you’ve found a good video on a topic, you can then look to see what else is on the same channel. I’ve spent a lot of time finding resources for by classes on statistics and SPSS use. Most of what I have found is on YouTube and using the channels once I’d identified some good quality material was a good search strategy. I’ve used this strategy the other way round too. I’ve found some poor and incorrect videos and then avoided other stuff on the same channel. (For those unfamiliar with YouTube, channels are how you post videos onto YouTube so looking at the channel is a way of seeing other videos posted by the same person – or institution).

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