If you’re looking to improve threaded discussions in your online courses, consider using brief video clips as discussion prompts. When carefully selected and integrated into a course, these clips can lead students to higher-order thinking and appeal to auditory and visual learning styles.

Stacey Williams, distance learning council co-chair and director of distance learning at Naugatuck Valley Community College, uses video clips to prompt discussion and says that her retention rates and student satisfaction have improved as a result. The key is to use these video clips within the context of scaffolding assignments rather than as stand-alone course elements.

Each unit in Williams’ courses incorporates the following elements:

• Learning objectives—These serve as a guide in selecting appropriate readings, activities, and video clips. To make these objectives clear to students, Williams sends them to students as either weekly email or pop-up announcements. The advantage of using pop-up announcements is that students have to do something with them (either close them or move them out of the way) before proceeding to the course activities, which increases the likelihood that they will read them.

• Readings—These include textbook and online readings found in library databases on real companies.

• PowerPoint—The PowerPoint slides emphasize the key concepts covered in the readings. “Whatever they didn’t get from the readings, the PowerPoint will hopefully bring out for them and make it a little easier to focus on the relevant key points,” Williams says.

• Concept quiz—After the PowerPoint presentation, Williams has students do practice assignments, typically multiple-choice or true/false quizzes. “They tend to do those practice tests or quizzes a little bit more readily when it’s a safe environment, so I keep those as a tool just for them,” Williams says.

• Video clips—Williams uses brief (up to five-minute) video clips from sources such as corporate websites, textbook publishers, Merlot, YouTube, and TeacherTube. “One of the biggest challenges is finding videos to use in a streaming format, but I do like the challenge of going out and finding them,” Williams says.

• Discussion—After viewing a video clip, students participate in a discussion based on the video. Williams typically asks students two questions based on the content of the video clip, and they are required to respond with a minimum of two paragraphs and responses to at least two classmates. “This gets the conversation going. It simulates what happens in a classroom, and it does tend to draw out the students who wouldn’t necessarily participate in a discussion in person. For me, it becomes a key part of an online course,” Williams says.

Each of these unit elements builds on the next. “I give them the foundational information first and then bring in the video to kind of get them to that application point where they can see the things that we talked about or the things that we read about. They can see these concepts being applied by real-world companies,” Williams says.

Selecting video clips

Video clips can come from a wide variety of sources. When selecting video clips, consider the following:

• Select video relevant to the course. There is a wealth of video posted online that has potential for use in online courses. However, it’s important to select video clips that are directly related to learning objectives and the concepts in the unit, Williams says. “Don’t just put up video without context around it. Don’t just build an assignment without telling them why they’re viewing it. Tie it into the topics that you’re trying to cover that week. Don’t let that be the only thing. Scaffold it with the lower-order thinking—objectives, readings, PowerPoint—and then start to get into the application part and let that push the students to think about things and apply the concepts and understand them and demonstrate their understanding through how they respond to questions and other students’ responses.”

• Check sources. Textbook publishers are an excellent source of video. To incorporate videos on a course site requires permission from the publisher. If the videos are in DVD format, they will need to be converted to streaming format, which can take a substantial amount of time. Videos from other sources such as YouTube are easily accessed, but remember that YouTube is not the creator of the video, nor is the creator necessarily the person who posted it. “I pretty much stick to educators or corporations because it’s easy to verify that a certain professor holds a PhD and does indeed work at a particular institution. I also limit my videos to things that are recognizable to the students and companies that are recognizable,” Williams says.

• Have a contingency plan. Williams does not currently have access to a streaming server, so she links videos from other sources to her course site. The disadvantage of not hosting the videos is that the creators or hosts of these videos can take them down at any time, which means that it is important to have a contingency plan in case students cannot view a particular video. “I’m always thinking, what if we can’t get to a video? Typically I have reviewed several when I make my choice so there are other possibilities out there. I use a variety of sources as well so I’m not just pulling [videos] from YouTube. If YouTube were to go down tomorrow, I have some other resources I can use,” Williams says.

Once you have incorporated video clips into your course, it’s important to check the links on a regular basis. “You need to check to see if the videos are still there. You need to keep your course fresh, and I think that’s a really good practice. Using video is forcing us to do that,” Williams says.

Student reaction

Although she has not yet conducted research on the effects on using video clips to prompt discussion, Williams has gotten positive feedback from students. “They absolutely love them. It’s hard to feel a student’s passion for a topic when they’re not right in front of you, but when I get the conversation going and see a threaded discussion of twenty threads from the first posting, that to me is a measurable outcome. That to me is feedback that these students are really engaging on a collegial level and a scholarly level.”

Contact Stacey Williams at SWilliams@nvcc.commnet.edu.

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