Inspire Blog Category: Multimedia

To Make Engaging Videos, Engage with Video-Making

How thoughtful pre-production helps instructors and media teams create exceptional educational videos Authors: Jake Wehrman & Jason Jones Great educational videos can look effortless. Compelling visuals, seamless editing, well-timed motion graphics – when everything works together, it’s easy to forget how much planning happened before anyone pressed “record.” The most memorable educational videos aren’t defined by expensive equipment or flashy effects. They are the result of instructors and media professionals dedicating time to engage creatively with each other, often weeks before the cameras start rolling. When everyone invests in the entire creative process, the final product becomes something greater than the sum of its parts. Two recent Oregon State University Ecampus productions illustrate this perfectly. Although the two projects couldn’t … To Make Engaging Videos, Engage with Video-Making
by · July 27, 2026

Difficult content? Try the power of vicarious learning!

A few years ago, I was taking a Statistics class that was dreaded by most students in my graduate program. Upon starting, I discovered with pleasure that the instructor had introduced a new textbook, called An Adventure in Statistics: The Reality Enigma by Andy Field. The book followed a story-telling format and featured an outlandish science-fiction type plot, humor, colorful graphics, and comic-book snippets. The merits of storytelling have been widely discussed, and that’s not what I want to talk about here. Rather, I’d like to highlight a specific element that I believe made a great contribution to the book’s instructional value: most of the content is presented through the dialogue between the main character, Zach, who needs to learn … Difficult content? Try the power of vicarious learning!
by · June 10, 2024

Visual Instructor Presence in Lecture Videos: Is Cognitive Load a Concern?

By: Julie Jacobs, Jana King, Dana Simionescu, Tianhong Shi Overview A recent scenario with our course development team challenged our existing practices with lecture media. Formerly, we had encouraged faculty to include only slides with narration in their lecture videos due to concerns about increasing learners’ cognitive load. Students voiced their hope for more instructor presence in courses, and some instructors started asking about including video of themselves inserted into their lectures. This prompted us to begin thinking about instructor presence in lecture videos more deeply: why were we discouraging faculty from including their faces in lecture videos? While our practices were informed by research-based media theory, we also recognized those theories might be outdated.  We began to explore the … Visual Instructor Presence in Lecture Videos: Is Cognitive Load a Concern?
by · August 28, 2023

Five Tips on Improving Readability in Your Courses

The following is a guest blog post from Aimee L. Lomeli Garcia, MLA. Aimee completed an Instructional Design internship with OSU Ecampus during the Fall of 2022. Have you ever found yourself reading the same paragraph over and over again only to not retain any information? Or been so overwhelmed with the content you’re trying to read that you’re unable to absorb any of it? Odds are that it may not just be the content you’re trying to read; it may be the way the information is laid out. One way to help read and retain information is to make the text more readable. Making information readable in your online course can seem overwhelming, but there are a few steps that you … <strong>Five Tips on Improving Readability in Your Courses</strong>
by · January 17, 2023

The Ghost in the Course Shell

We begin with a ghost story. This story may sound familiar. It begins in a space of learning. You enter as a student. You know you will be in this place for the next two or three months with other students and an instructor. But although you know you are all there in the same space, you can’t see or hear any other students. You wander alone until you discover a pre-recorded message telling you what to do. This should be reassuring, but the person in the video doesn’t look like the instructor listed on your course schedule. “Welcome,” says the man in the video. “In this course you will learn how to apply theoretical concepts in the real world.” … The Ghost in the Course Shell
by · December 16, 2022