Recording a lesson video students actually finish

The obvious way to make a lesson video is to record yourself teaching. The result is technically a lesson and almost nobody finishes it, because a live session is built around things that do not survive the recording: the pause while students write, the question you asked the room, the repetition for the person who arrived late.

Length is the whole battle

A recorded lesson is not watched in one sitting the way a live session is attended. It is watched on a phone, at night, competing with everything else on that phone. Ten minutes on one idea gets finished; forty-five minutes on a topic gets started. Split by concept, not by session: four short videos beat one long one even when the total runtime is identical, because a student who stops at minute twelve of a ten-minute video has finished it.

What to change from the live version

• Open with the question, not the outline. There is no register to take and no room to settle. The first fifteen seconds decide whether the video is watched at all, and "today we will look at three things" spends them badly.
• Cut every pause. Silence that works in a room is dead air on a phone, and it is where people leave.
• Say what is on screen. A significant share of students are listening while doing something else. A video that only works if you are watching it is a video with half its audience missing.
• End with something to do. A question, a problem, one instruction. Otherwise watching feels like studying, which is the specific illusion video is best at creating.

Production quality matters less than you think, with two exceptions

Nobody abandons a video over lighting. They abandon it over audio (a cheap microphone close to your mouth beats an expensive one across the room) and over unreadable writing. Fix those two and stop; every further hour spent on production is an hour not spent making the next video.

Know what it is for

Video is very good at explanation a student can replay, and very bad at everything requiring a response: diagnosis, correction, adaptation. Use it to move explanation out of the room so the room can be spent on the parts a recording cannot do.

Sources

• UNESCO — Education
• OECD — Education and Skills