Inspire Blog Category: Videos

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

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

Video Curation in Course Development

Part I: Role of Course Developer as Media Curator  This post is Part I of a two-part series on video selection and use in online courses. Part I provides the reasoning behind understanding course videos selection by course developers as a curatorial process. Part II will explore video curation in practice in course development and provide a course design perspective on video presentation and management issues. Recent Video Use Trends In September of 2020 the enterprise video company Kaltura Inc. conducted its seventh annual State of Video in Education 2020 report. The report included responses from across the education system spectrum with higher education institutions making up 53% of all respondents (Figure 1.). This report described how remote teaching-driven course … Video Curation in Course Development
by · May 24, 2021

Digital Storytelling for Higher Education

About halfway through earning a master’s in education, I took a summer session class on digital storytelling. It ran over the course of three half-day sessions during which we were required to complete two digital stories. I had no great academic ambitions in my approach to these assignments. I was trying to satisfy a degree requirement in a way that worked with my schedule as a single mother of two teenagers working full time while earning a graduate degree. My first story was a self-introduction. I loved this assignment. Even though I had one evening to complete it, I spent hours tweaking it. I enjoyed learning the tools. I enjoyed sharing my story with my classmates. Even after it was graded, … Digital Storytelling for Higher Education
by · December 9, 2019