Teasing with Trailers (aka Clipmercials for your Classes)

As I've written previously, because I'm not in a 1:1 iPad program, my perspective on using Clips has been to consider how use of Clips by the instructor alone might improve learning. In this case, I have a suggestion for how we can motivate students to attend class (maybe a problem more specific to higher ed) and/or to make class material relevant to the student. These are critical to help students engage with the material, and multimedia is a great mechanism to grab and hold student attention!

Class Trailers

You know what a trailer is: a commercial for a movie - a short "teaser" video that hopefully grabs your attention and interest and induces you to spend big bucks at the box office. After the 2017 ADE Academy, I decided that I would create a trailer for my 23 class meetings that are dedicated to learning/practicing new material and concepts.

I wanted my Clips-produced trailers to:

• have a consistent look
• be brief (so that students will watch them - mine range from thirty seconds to exactly one minute)
• do one thing and do it well: present one piece of information and then pose a related thought question that would, hopefully, stump the students and provoke their sense of curiosity about how the living world works

For example:

Trailer Structure

As you've seen from the example above, my Clips only have three parts:

• an intro Bumper
• an Observation
• a related Question

Trailer Production

The intro Bumper is based off of screen capture of a 3-D model of a DNA double-helix. I recorded the animation of the rotation and zooming of the DNA molecule using my iPad via QuickTime on my laptop. I imported that video into my Photos library and then imported it into Clips.

For each trailer, I found one still or video image related to the Observation that I described to the students. 

For accessibility (i.e. the deaf but also those of us who want to access the content of the video with the volume turned off), I captioned the Observation.

For that consistent look, I opted to use the same animated icon (the thought bubble) to hold a very brief summary (in text) of the live-captioned audio description I gave of the Question that we would discuss and attempt to answer.

I also used the same soundtrack for each Clip. With the amount of consistency I incorporated, my trailers are now pretty heavily "branded."

Trailer Distribution

Because I have produced a course manual that all my students download before the first day of class and use throughout the semester, I decided to embed all of the trailers on the front page of each chapter (one chapter = one class meeting). The students are required to read each chapter before class, so they watch the trailer before coming to the class meeting where we discuss the content. Caveat: embedding Clips can greatly increase the size of an epub/multitouch book/etc. Use embedded video sparingly! Most of my 75 students were clamoring for a leaner manual by the end of the first week of the term, so I made a second version with no embedded movies but links to YouTube, where I've created a playlist with all of my trailers. You can find them here:

BIOL 102 F'17: Clips Trailers - YouTube

This playlist does begin with a few Clips that are not trailers, but are other videos I distributed at the start of the term to help orient students to other aspects of my class. I'll cover some of these in future blog posts.

Benefits

Using the workflow described above is useful in at least a few ways:

• Student engagement. My students are coming to class prepared to have very interactive discussions about the topics
• Relevance. By watching the trailer before reading assigned textbook material as well as other microlecture videos I've created, students have at least one mental "hook" that they can use to sift through all of that material and identify components that are directly relevant to the Question posed in the trailer
• Assessment. We love to know if what we invest time doing for our students is making an impact! Embedded trailers didn't give me as much feedback as having YouTube-hosted movies. Using the Analytics tools built into YouTube, I can tell, for example, that in the last week, 4,443 minutes of my videos have been watched!
• Production. A simple and short structure makes it easy to create 23 trailers practically on a whim. The part that took longest was deciding what topic I would focus on during each class meeting. After that, assembling visual media and creating the Clips was very efficient.