Teaching with Technology: Course Promotion Video

This post is part of a series that comprise my Penn State Teaching with Technology (TWT) Portfolio. More information on TWT and links to each of these posts can be found at this hub page.

Teaching with Technology Rubric Item: Create One Multimedia File

While the phrase “teaching a course” might suggest a mental image of an instructor meeting with students in a classroom, it actually entails a far wider range of activities, from the more obvious (grading papers) to the less (managing a learning management system website). Likewise, “Teaching with Technology” means effectively using technology tools not only in the classroom, but across the range of teaching-related responsibilities. These can can include doing what you can to ensure that when you arrive in the classroom on day one, there are actually students in the seats.

When I got the opportunity to teach a literature course for the first time, I wanted to use every tool at my disposal to recruit students so that the class could run. I drew on my brief experience as an independent filmmaker to produce a 45-second Instagram reel that would be circulated by the department’s account. My goal was to inform students what they might expect from the course and (hopefully) get them interested enough in it to enroll. It appears to have been effective—the course was nearly full and 24% of my class stated that the video contributed most to their decision to enroll.

This project did take a considerable amount of time to complete: it took about seven hours, between writing the script, recording audio, collecting media, and editing it together. It is possible, however, to get to a comparable result with less of a time investment. For my Race, Ethnicity, and Magical Realism course, I saved a few hours by using basically the same script template. I also imagine that a mobile phone video that simply features the instructor describing the course and its goals might be comparably effective and less time-consuming.