Wait, how did you do that again?

Does the opening question sound familiar to you?

or

Does this sound familiar to you:

“… often students tell me that they don’t understand how to do THIS TASK when they read the book or look at their notes, but when I show them, THIS TASK seems easy. At that moment, they can immediately work through problems with THIS TASK. However, when they get home, some can’t quite recapture the understanding of the “how to” that seemed so easy when they saw it unfold.”

If you answered yes to either of these questions you might be interested in a recent article published in Educause quarterly entitled Show Me! On Demand: Budget Friendly Instructional Videos by Marilyn McClelland.

A veteran educator, McClelland was often receiving this type of question!  In order to address this, McClelland began developing a library of short on-demand videos that her students could use to address common difficulties or misconceptions.  The goal of this library project was to aid students in their learning while providing a time savings for both her and her students on a limited (non-existent) budget and the results were amazing!  The majority of students in McClelland’s class (40) reported that they used the provided resource (31) and found it either helpful (19) or very helpful (12).  Usage statistics support the student self reported data as all videos were watched and some of them were watched hundreds of times in a  single semester!

You may be thinking right now  that this seems too time consuming or costly, but with free tools like Jing and a little help from your Instructional Technologists this project can be free, fun, and fairly quick!  Contact us today: atc-ttc@wpi.edu and check out some videos created by your colleagues on our YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/wpittl.