Creating an award winning video doesn’t need much technology or technical know how.

Rene — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 15:18:18 +0000

After I won the community award in the Wikipedia Video contest in the category documentation and interview with my pointer in C video I would like to share some experiences on creating educational videos. This is mainly to encourage anyone to do the same as I did.
Have a look at the winning video again if you don’t remember it

In my opinion it doesn’t take much more than a real interest in education. So the video that won the award was used for me in a real teaching scenario. I only had one dry run before recording my one and only and published version of it (which still with more iterations could be a little bit shorter, more focused and slicker). Most time (about 3 hours) for the process was in planning how to present the learning content – something everyone teaching something should do anyway. The entire time it took me was less than 5 hours including planning, dryrun, recording, uploading and sharing with students.
The impact: From originally 16 Students that where participents in my class the video has been watched about 10 thousand times by now. Especially it was included in the wikipedia article on pointers and thus is hopefully a helpful resource for people interested in that topic.
Most important I did not need expensive technology. As you can see from the attached picture I did not even have a proper way of fixing my digital camera. The microphone was the internal one from that very digital camera. I used a couple of books together with a ruler to bring the camera to the correct position in order to be able to have a nice shot of the whiteboard that I was using. Other than that I used two lamps for proper light and lowered the outside courtains of the window.

What I am basically saying: Everyone who owns a camera (which most people nowadays do) can take a video and explain something. You can contribute your explaining video to the growing knowledge base on wikimedia commons. You can contribute to the ongoing discussion weather wikipedia articles should be enhanced with videos or not. Most important if you do everything like me on the whiteboard you will most certainly not run into any of the copyright problems that I ran before.
So what are you waiting for? I am sure you are an expert on something. Go and give it a shot and share your video here in the comments but also via wikimedia commons and maybe include it even within some wikipedia article that is fitting well.

pointer – Data Science, Data Analytics and Machine Learning Consulting in Koblenz Germany

Creating an award winning video doesn’t need much technology or technical know how.