Author Archives: Katherine Tanski

Design Strategies for Student Support in Online Courses

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Editor’s Note: This is a guest blog post by Skye Nguyen. Skye completed an Instructional Designer internship at Ecampus in Fall 2024 and graduated with an Instructional Design certificate from OSU in Spring 2024.

Support for students is a key component in increasing the likelihood of student success. Students can encounter various types of barriers, such as technical issues or glitches and learning curves of these technologies when taking classes, and even more so when taking online classes. Educause highlights that the expectation of the learning environment is changing to Learning Spaces (Learning Spaces, n.d.). These Spaces not only hold space for traditional classrooms but are morphing to include more virtual presence. 

To ensure a smooth transition we should incorporate support for students into the course design. By bringing more awareness and consideration into more instances of these learning spaces we enhance students’ chances of accessing these support resources. This increases the likelihood of a student avoiding a barrier altogether or getting connected to the right institutional support that can directly aid them in overcoming barriers to their success. 

In my current role at Lane Community College, I work with instructors directly in a support capacity.  I frequently receive inquiries about how they can aid student success in online and blended (hybrid) courses. Many courses already include an institutional statement or guide about student support either in the course or on the syllabus, but because they are ubiquitous and separate from their coursework and learning experience, students may not think to access those resources. Here are four strategies for enhancing support in an online or blended course by increasing the visibility, context, and redundancy of resources.

Consider the Types of Barriers Your Students Might Face

The types of barriers vary between institutions, colleges, programs, and even between classes and generally fall under two major categories: internal and external barriers to the course.

External barriers, such as financial stress, food insecurity, homelessness, childcare, or mental health issues, while not directly tied to the action of partaking in and submitting online coursework, can affect the student’s overall ability to succeed in school. Usman & Banu (2019) highlight that some of the effects of financial stress specifically can lead to poorer academic performance. These barriers impact the students’ quality of life, and their ability to be successful students in all of their courses. Ensuring students have access to support resources they will utilize in the course, as well as support resources for barriers they may be experiencing outside of the course will increase the student’s likelihood of success.

The internal barriers to the course can cause unneeded stress and can be more easily addressed with a little bit of care and foresight. It is important to keep in mind that students taking online classes will have different levels of experience with taking online courses even at the specific institution. This is especially important to keep in mind when thinking about instructional technologies they will be required to utilize for coursework in addition to the LMS (e.g. Blackboard, Canvas). For example, not all institutions use OneDrive as their cloud-based storage. Students may have encountered Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox and be unfamiliar with OneDrive. At the course level, not all classes utilize discussion forums, or you might have a student for whom this is their first online course at this institution, and they might be unfamiliar with the way discussion boards work in this LMS compared to another. 

How this works in course design:  Pair resources together based on processes or types of resources when they are needed for a specific activity. For example, if an assignment requires a student to submit a video, it is important to make sure there are resources for every step of the process, from creation to submission. Pairing the instructions for the activity with tutorials on how to record a video, upload the video to the institution’s streaming platform (e.g. Kaltura, YouTube), and share the video link provides students with all the resources, right when they need them

Figure 1

Figure 1: A process shown with each step linking out to a tutorial.

Think about Multiple Formats

Support can be offered in various formats, each one useful in different ways. By providing multiple formats you can directly improve Universal Design for Learning (UDL) even more throughout the course. This can look like providing a how-to video but also adding a link to a help article with text instructions below that video.

Consider integrating the following common resources into your course to enhance student support:

  • Help articles from the institution or platform (i.e. Canvas, Microsoft, Kaltura).
  • Video tutorials from the institution, Microsoft, or user communities.
  • Support Service contact information such as name of service, purpose, email, and phone. This could be student technology help desks or coaching and counseling services for example.

You can think of these types of resources when building your support framework throughout the course for students. 

How This Works in Course Design: Ideally, students should be provided resources for every situation in multiple formats. A help article might be suitable for a short process needed across a wide range of people or for use in multiple courses. In-page instructions might be beneficial for providing quick guidance on completing an assignment directly within a course. Consider the situation, available resources for creation or storage, and the context in which students will need support to determine the most effective format.

Figure 2

Figure 2: A help article linked to the top of support resources for video tips, and instructions directly on the assignment page in the support resources for using discussions.

Be Mindful of Visibility 

Students should not have to go digging to find the resources they need. Support should always be visible, easily accessible, and located where students will need them, when they need them. For instance, having support resources that students will need regularly or are more general should be included in the syllabus and at the top of the course. This will enable students to start the course with those resources in hand.

For resources that are connected to activities students may only need once, or require more in-depth instruction, place those resources where they are needed and when they are needed.  For example, if you want students to know how to share a document in a discussion forum activity, provide the information within the activity itself.

How This Works in Course Design:  Support resources need to be integrated seamlessly into both the course design and the course content. Avoid making support obtrusive to the activity, as it may distract from the content such as “Support” in red text at the top of the page. Instead, make it intentional and readily accessible. For instance, placing support information right before the first step of a process, such as at the end of assignment instructions but before the submit button, ensures it is conveniently located for students. This practice pulls on UDL guidelines where redundancy and providing information in multiple places improves the learning experience for these skills (UDL: The UDL Guidelines, n.d.).

Don’t forget the course instructor or facilitator! 

Sometimes instructional designers design courses with a developer who might not be teaching the course. The instructor may be unfamiliar with the support resources, why they are being included, and what they are expected to do with them. A well-supported instructor can create a more effective online learning experience. By establishing a resource space for course instructors, such as an Instructor Guide, you can provide instructors with a 1-stop shop for support even before they encounter difficulties. Faculty also have access to technical support options that students do not have, such as a Help Desk or faculty support team.  Ensuring faculty are aware of all of their support options enables instructors to focus on their tasks, knowing they have resources available when they need them.

How This Works in Course Design: An example of this is creating an instructor guide which not only gives them links to resources to support students but gives them an area to find resources for running the course or troubleshooting a common issue. This could be in a hidden page resource marked “For Instructor Only” at the top of the course.

Figure 3

Figure 3: Instructor guide example in the LMS course itself with links to important resources for instructors such as common student support resources,  how to communicate with students, how to grade, etc.

Figure 4

Figure 4: Instructor guide as a hidden page resource at the bottom of a start here section in an online course in Canvas.

That’s it! These are just a few ways to improve support, and there are many others. The key takeaway here is to always consider the specific course design needs  when designing the support framework during course development

Sources

Learning Spaces. (n.d.). EDUCAUSE. Retrieved February 25, 2024, from https://www.educause.edu/research-and-publications/books/educating-net-generation/learning-spaces

UDL: The UDL Guidelines. (n.d.). Retrieved February 25, 2024, from https://udlguidelines.cast.org/

Usman, M., & Banu, A. (2019). A Study on Impact of Financial Stress on Students’ Academics. Journal of Business & Economic Policy, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.30845/jbep.v6n1p7

Backwards Brand Design: How to SIFT through your work experience and craft a brand identity as an Instructional Designer

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This article has its roots in a discussion I had with an Ecampus intern about going on the job market. This intern is working in an academic technologies role at a higher ed institution already, but also getting the Instructional Design certificate here at OSU. It was my first time thinking about what the growth of instructional design certificate and degree credentials means for all instructional designers. Very few of the instructional designers I’ve met and worked with here or at my previous institutions actually have degrees in instructional design, including myself. The field of instructional design emerged out of a specific institutional and educational need in higher education and corporate education, which makes for an ever-growing, ever-changing, but always innovative membership. How do we, as a field, continue to be inclusive of all instructional designers, regardless of their academic or educational backgrounds? 

One potentially positive fact is that academia moves very slowly, so we have some time to strategize. Instructional design is still an emerging speciality within higher education, with each institution classifying that role differently, and providing that role with different levels of support. Some institutions, even today, do not have any instructional designers. Current research indicates that this must change. One of the best sources of data about the field of instructional design in higher education and instructional designers is the Changing Landscape of Online Education (CHLOE) Project. The participants in the CHLOE survey are “the senior online officer at each participating institution.” This survey pool recognizes the variance in organizational structures at different institutions by focusing on the COO’s purview. In the 2019 CHLOE 3 survey, it was reported that the median number of instructional designers employed at 2-year colleges, and public and private 4-year institutions, was four, regardless of enrollment or institution size. In CHLOE 7, one of the conclusions was that “insufficient instructional design staffing may be one of online learning’s most serious long-term vulnerabilities,” with only 10% of Chief Online Officers surveyed describing their ID capacity as sufficient for their current needs, and only 3% believing they would be able to meet anticipated need. 

These findings signal that universities should be moving towards a significant fiscal investment in hiring instructional designers. Joshua Kim wrote a few key takeaways from the CHLOE 7 in CHLOE 7: The Present and Future of Instructional Design Capacity. Kim predicts that universities will need to not only hire more instructional designers, but that these roles will need to be hybrid or remote to attract the post-pandemic workforce. In addition to hybrid and remote options, Kim posits that, “Forward-thinking universities may find that they need to start offering star non-faculty educators the same recognition and incentives that have long been necessary to recruit and retain star tenure-line faculty.” But what does this mean for instructional designers? How would an instructional designer even be able to become identified as a “star” within the field or even at a specific institution? 

Understanding Branding for Faculty and Non-Faculty Educators

Circling back to my initial inquiry about what instructional designers can do to ensure the field stays inclusive, I believe an individual enterprise will have a collective impact that will benefit the largest number of people: personal branding. In What’s the Point of a Personal Brand? Executive coach Harrison Monarth uses the story of his client, Mike, to illustrate how important it is for employees to think about how personal branding is now a strategy for gaining visibility within organizations, and that visibility is now a key component when employers are thinking about promotion. Monarth observes that “In high-performing organizations, at certain levels, everyone is exceptional. To clearly differentiate your value and what you bring to the table, you need to do more than have a good reputation. You need to have an outstanding personal brand.” Having a brand isn’t the same thing as being a celebrity, although I think many would agree that there are celebrities in every field, even instructional design. 

Creating a personal brand is a successful career strategy outside of the corporate world as well, and one of the fields that is encouraging faculty to think about branding is not, as one might think, business but medicine. In 2019, the Academic Medicine blog published Knowing Your Personal Brand: What Academics Can Learn From Marketing 101, the purpose of which was to persuade medical professionals that a brand identity can be empowering. According to the article,

[K]nowing one’s academic brand can (1) help faculty members approach projects and other responsibilities through the lens of building or detracting from that brand, (2) provide a framework for determining how faculty members might best work within their institutions, and (3) help faculty members better understand and advocate their own engagement and advancement.

Although this article specifically speaks to and about academic teaching faculty, Instructional designers at institutions are often placed in the professional faculty role, along with librarians or program directors, and have many of the same professional demands on their job descriptions. As former faculty, I can attest that both of my careers have included independent  research, departmental service, and conference or publication responsibilities. 

Finding Your Personal Brand

If a brand is defined as opinions that people have about you based on your work, it is important to be self-aware, and intentional about the work that you do. Creating your brand can be a difficult task if, like me, you have a variety of experiences and interests. It requires self-reflection about one’s accomplishments and body of work as a whole, and the need to generalize what are sometimes very disparate activities. In Using Your Personal Mission Statement to INSPIRE and Achieve Success, an article published in Academic Pediatrics, the official journal of the Academic Pediatric Association, the authors describe a framework for building a personal mission statement (INSPIRE):

  • Identify Your Core Values
  • Name the Population You Serve
  • Set Your Vision
  • Plan How You Will Achieve Your Vision
  • Identify Activities That Align With Your Mission
  • Review, Revise, and Refine Your Mission Statement
  • Enlist Others to Help You Accomplish Your Mission

A slimmed down version of this same framework can be a helpful starting point for creating a brand identity. It enables you to identify your core values, name the population you serve, and identify activities that support those values and populations. But unlike a mission statement, this framework is best completed in reverse; a backwards brand design, if you will. (Sidenote: Instructional designers love to do things backwards). I call this framework SIFT:

  • Start with your experience and accomplishments
  • Identify keywords or topics
  • Frame your work and interests
  • Tie everything together

I believe that SIFT-ing has the potential to be a reflective process that will lead to a changing self-awareness of different types of instructional designers, for ourselves, and collectively. 

Start with your experience and accomplishments

The best place to begin is with your complete resume or CV. It might be tempting to start with the tailored version you used to get your last position, but you don’t want to limit your view to only things that you think are relevant to instructional design. I can trace some elements of my brand back to my undergraduate and graduate degrees. I also include my two years as a contracted captioner for 3play and Rev within the same brand. Finding a brand that encompasses all that you are will only be successful if you use the most complete picture of yourself.

Identify keywords or topics

Your brand is more than just the places that you’ve worked at, the committees you’ve served on, and projects you’ve worked on. To understand your brand, you should begin by identifying a perspective, or positionality, that informs the decisions you’ve made in the past, however unconsciously that might have been, and looks towards the future. Keywords can be a useful next step, but you will want to avoid the potential to find yourself trapped within categories! In a field like medicine, there are already established research interests and specialties. As a field, instructional design hasn’t reached the point of specialization, but we are trending towards accepting that there are too many topics that fall under the broad umbrella of instructional design for everyone to be experts in everything. For example, the Quality Matters Instructional Designers Association has 21 expertise categories that you can select from when joining the association that others can use to find you to connect with you. 

A screencapture of the list of categories from the QM IDA website
A screencapture of the list of categories from the QM IDA website

When I first joined the QM IDA, I didn’t know what boxes to check, or even what some of these categories were. And since they are presented without explanation, the criteria for self-identification are unclear. I can check almost all of these boxes as things I have experience in—with the exception of K12 and the Continuing and Professional Education Rubric, but is experience the same thing as expertise? It might be my imposter syndrome talking, but I am more inclined to identify with interests than areas of expertise. (Sidenote: I still haven’t checked any boxes.) 

Frame your work and interests

I hadn’t noticed a pattern to my interests while I was doing them, but by reflecting on my professional journey, I realized that I could trace one interest all the way back to my undergraduate honors thesis, through to my current career as an instructional designer. I’ve always had an interest in communities and the community spaces they inhabit—especially if they are online. Community doesn’t appear on QM’s list of categories, but it is the lens through which I approach many of the categories on that list. Accessibility, Computer-Based Learning, Distance Education, Hybrid instruction/Design, LMS, Multimedia Creation, Problem-Based Learning—all of these categories need to address questions of community by addressing inclusivity, access, equity, and authentic student-student and student-teacher interactions. Community is the keyword I use to frame my research interests and approach to instructional design, in all of its various forms.

Tie everything together

If you go to my LinkedIn profile, you’ll see that I have “Humanities girl in an instructional technology world” as my headline. That’s my brand. You might notice that it does not include “instructional design” or “community.” But at the same time, by labeling myself a humanist, I am evoking the words associated with humanities and humanism–things like communities, kindness, compassion, human potential, and the arts. Technology is often viewed either as the savior of humanity, or its destruction. In reality, of course, it’s both. By framing myself as a humanist working with technology, I am clueing people in that my perspective on technology will incorporate potential negative impacts for people. The playful nature of the headline i.e. using “girl” to rhyme with “world” also reveals my personality. Compare this headline with something like, “I am interested in humane approaches to technology used in education.” It’s true, but it doesn’t tell you about me as a person outside of my interests. 

Being “On Brand”

To declare a brand is not to limit your interests, nor should it be criticized as promoting a non-interest in other topics. Another observation from Kim is that instructional designers are likely very busy, and overstretched. In his words, there is “a significant mismatch between institutional demand for instructional design services and the available supply.” To avoid burnout, instructional designers need to be strategic with the projects they commit to. A brand can also help you be selective about which conferences you attend, or committees you serve on. Being “on brand” can be a way of focusing your energy, and also a touchstone of your identity. 

Using the SIFT framework, you can reflect on your professional values, and your professional goals. One of my colleagues in the field is an accessibility expert, and gets called in to consult on all things related to accessibility in addition to her daily work as an instructional designer. She recently became a certified Accessibility Professional with the IAAP, and this credential is visible on her LinkedIn profile as an emblem of her brand. Knowing her brand allowed her to appeal to her institution to allow her this opportunity that enriches not only her own skillset, but the prestige of her institution by having an IAPP certified accessibility professional on their staff. In that sense, personal branding can also help institutions build diverse departments that are teams of specialists.

To return to the three benefits of branding for faculty outlined in the Academic Medicine article, knowing my brand helps me decide where to devote my limited bandwidth by pursuing professional activities that are “on brand” for me. I can also use my brand to search for specific opportunities that will build my brand, even if those fall outside the typical skillset of instructional designers. However, moving towards a “branding” mindset also benefits my colleagues, who are equally, individually, uniquely talented, and should be recognized for their specialties and allowed to follow their passions, rather than be constrained to their job duties. As instructional design teams at universities grow, having a team of specialists can also help alleviate burnout by allowing people to play to their strengths. This can ensure that instructional design remains a space where all career pathways are valid and not contingent on specific credentials.

References

Borman-Shoap, Emily, Li, Su-Ting T., St Clair, Nicole E., Rosenbluth, Glenn, Pitt, Susan, and Michael B. Pitt. Knowing Your Personal Brand: What Academics Can Learn From Marketing 101 Academic Medicine 94(9):p 1293-1298, September 2019.

Kim, J. CHLOE 7: The Present and Future of Instructional Design Capacity InsideHigherEd (2022)

Li, Su-Ting T., Frohna, John G. and Susan B. Bostwick. Using Your Personal Mission Statement to INSPIRE and Achieve Success View from the Association of Pediatric Program Directors 17(2): p107-109, March 2017.

Monarth, H. What’s the Point of a Personal Brand? Harvard Business Review (2022)

Uranis, J. Definition Update: Chief Online Learning Officer (COLO) (2023)

Imagineering, Improvisation, and Instructional Design

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In the 1980s, The Walt Disney Company rebranded its Disney Parks engineers as “imagineers,” and I think “instructional imagineering” would be a great rebranding of instructional design (if not for the copyright issue) because I often feel that the work I do is closer to engineering than design. Instructional designers are problem-solvers, but the work we do is not just problem-solving. It’s creative problem-solving, with each new project having new and specific challenges that often need a little imagination to solve–and a little improvisation.

The history of the pedagogy of improvisation is traced back to the work of two women, Neva Boyd and Viola Spolin, working in Chicago in the 20s and 30s. Boyd was a sociologist doing social work with poor immigrant communities at Hull House. She published a theory of play based on her work, which highlighted the positive socialization skills learned by children during games, and theatre or storytelling games in particular. Spolin was a student of Boyd’s, and developed a full drama pedagogy inspired by Boyd’s theories for her own teaching practice.  Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, grew up in this environment and was one of the founders of The Second City in 1959.

In 2015, Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton from The Second City published Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses “No, But” Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration–Lessons from The Second City, which was when I first learned about the workplace applications of improvisational comedy. There are a lot of videos and articles out there that also demonstrate improvisational comedy gamers as teambuilding exercises, but what I liked about The Second City’s approach is that it’s not just about the games. In 2018, Kelly Leonard and Anne Libera gave a presentation at Recode’s Code Conference on how the principles of improv can help foster better communication in the workplace. The presentation is just under twenty minutes, but it’s filled with insights from the very start, one of my favorites being, “Improvisation is practice in being unpracticed, which is how we all walk through the world.”

Two Second City directors show how improv can be used the workplace | Code 2018

Innovative business leaders desiring to tap into creativity have adopted the phrase “yes, and” mindset approach to teamwork and collaboration, but still face the challenge of how to implement and leverage improvisational thinking into everyday practice.  Carrie Freeman, Co-CEO of SecondMuse, Forbes Councils Member, and the author of The Power Of A ‘Yes, And’ Mindset To Solve Complex Problems, puts it in these terms: “The ‘yes, and’ approach lets us tap into potential far beyond meeting the immediate needs of a problem.” She concludes that, “It is likely that in broadening our search for ‘yes, and’ solutions, we will discover synergies heretofore undiscovered.”

The course design process is a problem-solving process, and it is a process dependent upon conversations and dialogue between multiple parties. These conversations all offer opportunities to practice the improvisational mindset. The first conversation, between the instructional designer and course developer, is an opportunity to set the tone of the development process. It’s when I ask the most “yes, and” questions. Each successive response from either myself or the course developer offers an opportunity to either follow up or change direction. That conversation can also lead to conversations with the media teams, which are also opportunities to set the tone using “yes, and” mentality to further creativity and collaboration. Kelly Leonard, in the 2018 Recode presentation, states that “Improvisation is yoga for your social skills,” and like any yoga practice, it must be practiced. It’s a kind of mindfulness; a way of being in the moment, listening to the ideas of others, and creating a space for imagination and collaboration.

One final note is that, like improv, you never know who you will be working with on a given project. Some improv games are more fun than others. But leveraging the “yes, and” mindset depends upon not going into a situation with expectations, assumptions, or predictions, even when it might involve people you’ve worked with before. I’ve been watching Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie on “Whose Line Is It, Anyway?” for twenty years, and while they are consistently funny, there are some scenes that are more memorable than others (see: 15 Times Ryan AND Colin Owned “Whose Line Is It, Anyway?”). But what keeps me watching is that you never know what scene will end up as part of the next greatest clips compilation, because they never know what’s going to happen next either. 

The Ghost in the Course Shell

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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.”

You wander around the space. An announcement appears, welcoming you to the course. It includes a picture of the instructor listed on your schedule.

“So they do exist,” you think to yourself. And yet, as you look around, all the recordings you see are of someone else. This isn’t really their class, you realize. Someone else built this place. It’s unsettling to be in this space and feel like your instructor doesn’t belong here. Maybe you don’t belong here either.

Eventually, you find the one place where you can talk to other students, but even this space feels strange and isolating. There’s writing on the wall.

Please introduce yourself.

You can see writing by other students in the class, but the instructor never makes a comment. You come back to this room several times during the term to write more, as directed. You write replies to what other students have written, but it doesn’t really feel like talking. It feels like a performance, judged by the unseen, unheard instructor who exists only in writing.

The weeks go by. You listen to a disembodied voice talking over a slideshow lecture. Your instructor makes their ghostly presence known through weekly announcements and in the grades that appear on your homework. On one assignment, you see a comment in addition to the grade:

If you would like to talk to me about your grade, please make an appointment to meet during my office hours.

But you don’t. The idea of meeting your mysterious instructor is more terrifying than a bad grade.

The term ends, and the doors open for the students to leave. Even though you did well, you feel unsatisfied with the experience. You can’t wait to leave and put this strange, unsettling experience behind you. You learned what you were supposed to learn, but the instructor was a ghost; their presence an afterimage of a creator from long ago. Months later, you realize you’ve forgotten your instructor’s name, but you never forget the man in the videos.

My ghost story was partly inspired by the story I read last year about automated courses that are still using the videos created by someone who has since passed away. Sometimes it takes a true story like this to remind us that students know when an online instructor is present, and when they are absent. They know what it’s like to be taught by a ghost–even if that instructor is still living. This story was also a stark reminder to me as an instructional designer that it doesn’t matter how well-designed a course is if the students do not feel like the instructor is actually there and present with these students, while the course is running. 

What it means for an instructor to be present in an online course was challenged by the forced shift to online teaching in the early days of the pandemic lockdown. Many teachers used Zoom or other web conferencing software to meet with students during their scheduled class times, to varying degrees of success, and varying degrees of exhaustion. Suddenly, we were not in a classroom or office and neither were our students. We saw bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, cars, parks, and parking lots. We saw parents and kids and intrusive cats. We saw a lot of camera malfunctions, heard a lot of microphone feedback, and experienced many technical difficulties.

But because this was a global crisis, there was a collective understanding that it is more important to be present than to be perfect. While online students may have already experienced the ghost in the course shell, for the first time, instructors were experiencing the other side of that ghost story. Previously embodied in a physical classroom, they were now reduced to digital images, speaking into the void of black boxes; ghosts of their former selves. They found the experience just as eerie as their students. And just like a ghost who struggles to get a message to their loved ones from beyond the grave, a lot of instructors struggled to find a way to reach their students from beyond the classroom.

In the early days of lockdown, a colleague of mine asked for help with one of his online course videos. He always recorded his video announcements the same way he recorded his lectures: inside his office, wearing a suit, looking very formal and professional. This time he wanted to do something different. He wanted to show his students that he was also feeling the strain of lockdown, and that they were all in this lockdown together. An avid walker himself, he decided that he wanted to encourage his students to go for a walk outside, and then show himself walking outside.

“How can I do that?” he asked. 

He had no idea how to make a video that did that, because he’d never seen anyone make a video like that–and no one to teach him.

“Go for a walk,” I told him. “Record a video on your phone while you’re walking and send it to me–I’ll do the rest.”

That experience led me to think about how students engage with video content that is formal and compare that to how they interact with content that is informal. Instructors can tap into what makes some of the best internet content these days–authenticity and informality–if they know how. Video is the easiest and most successful way to create authentic presence and build a sense of community with the students taking the course, and it only requires using one technology that most people use every day: a smart phone.

As an instructional designer, I want to enable and empower the faculty I work with, and that includes providing resources and support to prepare them to deliver their course as well assist with the design. I can find many articles written for educators about how to create home recording studios for professional-looking lecture videos, but I have yet to find an article that explicitly focuses on advising faculty how to make informal videos for course delivery purposes that goes beyond the theoretical to the practical, so I decided to write one. 

I’m going to focus on TikTok as the model for these videos not because I think faculty should be on TikTok, but because TikTok changed the game for authentic video engagement. Like many of my generation, I’m not on TikTok, and I needed my younger Gen Z friends to explain it to me. (PBS just premiered a documentary on TikTok as explained by Gen Z, so I am clearly not alone in this). But what I do understand, and what I think faculty can bring to their course videos, is the importance of the creator-viewer dynamic popularized by TikTok. 

What goes viral on TikTok tends to encapsulate a mood, and not require any particular technical expertise to create–like the video by the guy who recorded himself on his skateboard, sipping cranberry juice while listening to Fleetwood Mac. That kind of realness is increasingly important in a digital age where there’s a growing disconnect between “brand” and “authenticity.” It’s why corporations like Wal-Mart have moved from brand partnerships with well-known influencers on Instagram to creating their own “influencer” platform where they will pay for “real” testimonials of their products, and NBCUniversal just announced a initiative with TikTok stars to create television shows.

So how can instructional designers, media producers, and instructors tap into this zeitgeist? How do you prove to your students that you’re not a ghost lurking in the course shell? Good design for videos is often invisible–just like good design in an online course–because we experience them as a whole and they have a cumulative effect. But by looking at examples, we can identify specific elements that are associated with TikTok videos that are visually distinct from traditional videos. They also serve a different purpose, and that purpose can be supplemental to a traditional video. I’ve separated out eight individual elements in the two video examples where the design decision has a different effect on the audience. 

Design Element

YouTube

TikTok

Purpose

 Educational/entertainment Announcement/call to action

Orientation

 Horizontal (optimal for viewing on a television or desktop browser) Vertical (optimal for recording and viewing on a phone)

Setting

 In a studio On location

Lighting Source

 Stage/studio overhead Hand-held ring light

Camera Angles

 Medium, multiple shots from multiple camera angles Medium, close up, extreme close up, one continuous shot

Wardrobe

 “Formal” “Casual”

Audience

 Speaking to a group Speaking to an individual 

Length

 15 minutes 1 minute

There’s one additional element that is important to understanding why TikTok creates an immediacy with the viewer even beyond the timeliness of the video. TikTok videos are both ephemeral (in the sense that social media platforms are themselves ephemeral and therefore so is the content) and time-specific (in the sense that the content is only relevant until the event takes place). This time-specific framing and call to community is what makes the video feel so immediate and inclusive. Instructors often try to connect with students in this way through announcements or discussion boards, but it is far more difficult to try to accomplish with those tools. Video, because it is visual, and because it is such a large part of students’ daily lives, is able to make that connection far more easily.

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And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for: here are some strategies for how to create a video with TikTok vibes using existing pre-scripted announcements. 

  • Record your video on your phone. You do not need to have the latest iPhone or Pixel with a 4k camera. Remember that amateur videos are better than professional-looking videos in creating the “person to person” connection. Your students don’t all have the latest phone, and so they don’t expect you to either. There are a couple of different ways to get video from your phone to your online course. At Oregon State, we use Kaltura to host videos, and you can either upload a video from your phone directly to Kaltura, or record your video using the Zoom app on your phone, which will automatically upload to Kaltura. 
  • Keep it current. Students want to feel like their instructors are existing at the same moment in time as they are and are in a specific location–even if it’s not in the same location as they are. You can comment on the weather or changing of the seasons. And don’t hesitate to go outside! Nothing signifies real time than the weather, and think of the impact of a term-long video sequence in front of a tree as it goes from green summer, to red fall, and finally bare winter. If there are events happening on OSU’s campus, or holidays, those are also good opportunities to connect with students at a specific time.
  • Keep it short. Most of the video content students consume on social media platforms is under 5 minutes. Any longer than that and you risk losing their attention. Keeping the videos short reinforces their purpose as timely, especially if they see a new video every week.
  • Make students feel “seen.” You might comment on work that has been received, or point to meaningful discussion board posts they might have missed. You might address a question that a student brought up during office hours or by email. Students value this kind of acknowledgement, even if they are not one of the students being acknowledged. Even the tone you use in recording to the video can create that relationship between speaker and audience. Talk to the camera as if it is a person, and not just a recording device. Students want to feel like you are talking to them, not at them. 
  • Change the way they see you–visually. If all of your videos in your class are studio productions or voiceover slideshows, your students have only one idea of what you are like. Move locations. If your students only see you behind a desk or in the studio, find another location. If you can find a location that relates to the week’s topic, fantastic, but even going to your living room or kitchen will be a welcome change. Change your wardrobe. Go casual. If your formal lecture videos have you in a suit and tie in a library, dress down in a fleece or t-shirt and go outside the office–or even outdoors! (climate YMMV). Even being in a kitchen, living room, or patio will create an informality that feels authentic.