General help

Colin, if students don't read what you write on paper I wonder if they will watch your videos?  It might be a lot of work without your desired benefit.  I can begin sharing some ideas with you about what you would like to do with video.

1) Where are you going to put all of these videos?  On YouTube?  Managing all of the videos could take some effort.  Do you have a video server available?  I do, and it works well.  My university provides it to me, so I have no idea how it operates and what it costs.  As a minimum, you will spend twice the amount of time producing and delivering your video for every minute of content.  So if you give a student 5 minutes of feedback, it is 10 minutes of your time.  If you have 20 students in a course, that's over 3 hours per assignment.

2) I assume that your students are remote?  If not, why not just arrange a physical review time with them?

3) When I make my own "live" videos, I just mount my iPhone on a tripod.  Smartphone quality has become great, and there is no need to invest in any fancy cameras or equipment.  Consider mocking up this setup and experimenting.

4) It is likely that you will want to edit each video, many cutting out some of the wasted beginning or end.  Any you will probably want to compress and encode it.  This also takes time.  The output file format is easy... mp4.  But there are many settings that affect the size and quality of your final video.

5) Remember, the Mac has always been the better multimedia computer.  In my 30 years of working with PCs and now Macs, I believe the Mac is still best.  Sure, one can do this with a PC.  It will take more time, it will crash more often, and it doesn't manage resources as effectively.  But go for the PC if you wish.

6) I purchased a "green screen" system, with lamps, for around $125 on ebay.  I believe a "lamp only" system should cost less.

7) I use two video editing products: Camtasia, and Adobe Premiere.  A teacher license for Camtasia costs about $100/year.  Right now, through my university, The complete Adobe Suite costs me $10/year.  But this is to change soon, and it may end up costing me $20/month (regular teach rate.)

Camtasia shines at computer-screen video captures and annotations.  Premiere shines at video composition and output.  Depending upon what I am doing, I will take output from Camtasia and further edit it in Premiere.  However, one can do a lot with Camtasia, and Camtasia does output good mp4s, it lack some of the powerful editing and management tools of Premiere.

8) Consider initially doing this not for every paper, but as a review for the entire group.  Your video could take on "I want to review with everyone some of the things that I saw were good with everyone's papers, and some things that need improvement."  This might be a 20 minute video once each assignment, or once each week.  (Or it could be "I want to show you 10 good things and 10 wrong things with your submittals.")

9) Many interesting pedagogical things that you can do.  Students who do well do not need to resubmit, unless they want to improve their grade.  Students who don't meet a certain grade threshold have to resubmit.  Many others.

10) Learning the world of video will consume a lot of your time.  It does for me, but I feel it is the way of the future of education and worth my effort.

If you go to the bottom of my homepage, you will see some links to my Moodlemoot presentations, and videos.  If you go to my rjMoodle links, at the top of my Moodle, click Help, and you will see more of my videos.

Last year, at MountainMoot, I tried to talk about video production.  I only had a half hour of so.  It didn't work well.  One attendee mentioned that it was "trying to squeeze an elephant into a tuna can."

Well, in summary, I think you could do what you want to do.  You probably already have a smart phone.  For other equipment, probably less than $150.  Software, probably $100 to $300 per year.  Time?  Probably more than you want to spend, but you decide. 

Hi Colin,

Rick's points about video is "spot on" but don' worry about what he says in point #5...PC's work just fine for video editing. The main thing is, that both Mac's and PC's will do a fine job, so use whichever you have.

A good Windows video editor that is reasonably price is Corel VideoStudio Ultimate. On sale right now for $89.99, plus it does have education licensing if you need it for a whole lab, like I used to do.

Another good video editor (free one) believe it or not, is Blender, which is actually an Open Source 3D creation program, that has built in video editing capability. The only down side is the program has a fairly steep learning curve. Like Rick I use Camtasia, but my version is an old one that still works fine.

One thing I have started recommending for creating videos, is OBS Studio, Open Broadcaster Software, which is free. Versions for Windows, macOS 10.10+, and Linux are available. It allows you to live switch from multiple video cameras, computer monitors, pre-recorded videos, pre-recored audio, still pictures, documents, presentations, etc. while live streaming or recording for later editing or use. It works really nice on my current desktop with dual monitors and up to four USB cameras. Since I rarely show myself on screen, I usually use a wireless headset for narration which allows me to move around without affecting the quality and volume of the sound recording.

Since you mention you might need a document camera, setup, save your money and don't buy one of the overpriced ones with a document platform and lights. See if you can get a Siggi HD Plus USB camera from IPEVO. Depending on the model, they're only about $100 and are made with a crane arm that allows you to position and rotate the camera as needed. Also has a built in microphone, if needed.

If you ever want to add sub-titled text to your videos, another free program, Aegisub does that easily. Versions for Windows, OS X and Unix are available.