Hindsight (I): lecture capture best practice

Despite the title of this post, I actually saw this issue coming and yet did nothing. As Metallica sing in "No Leaf Clover," "The soothing light at the end of your tunnel was just a freight train coming your way."

One of my long-term goals of lecture capturing was to be able to re-use material I recorded (in office hours, in class, as exam and exercise keys, as pre-class videos, etc.) Had I really and truly appreciated how much video I would create in one semester (over 102 hours), I might have worked harder as I was generating those videos creating two ancillary resources that I am sure will improve the quality of these resources for enhancing student learning:

1. captions (as I've been writing about so far this academic year here and here)
2. tables of contents for the videos

Producing a Table of Contents for each video is incredibly important for you and for your students.

For you

When you want to incorporate a nugget of information (like that time you recorded the perfect explanation of why genetic linkage negates the expectation of Mendel's second law - independent assortment), it will be much easier to find if you have written (and computer-searchable!) contents of all of your videos. My Excel spreadsheet contains, at its core, three pieces of information:

1. Topic (phrases, keywords, search terms, etc.)
2. Video filename
3. Time reference (i.e. 2:01 into the movie file)

For the students

After you create the ToC, add it to your videos on YouTube! This will help students quickly navigate to topics within that hour-long lecture video that they really want to watch again. Here's how:

1. In your YouTube Video Manager, select the "Info and Settings" button below the video at left:

2. In the text book for "Basic info," paste in your text Table of Contents. Mine, as you can see (below) is the video timepoint followed by a brief description of what is happening in the video starting at that time

3. After saving that text entry, when anybody views your video, they will see something like the below: YouTube automatically detects the time stamps you pasted into the Info box and hyperlinks to those time points in the movie. When one of my students wants to review the core concepts and vocabulary I presented in this lecture, they click on the "17:04" link in the Table of Contents and are whisked to that precise point in the video.

So, now that I've spent much of my Labor Day weekend "free time" cataloging video from previous terms, I'm advocating for being more deliberate at doing these mundane tasks as we go! Don't let it slide - if you want to capitalize on the digital resources you're curating, this is critical!

"Sucker for that quick reward," indeed. Nicely played, Metallica.