Record videos for students with travel restrictions

Divide up your slides

• Find the natural breaks in your content. These are typically the transitions between key concepts, or perhaps sub-points that build to a greater argument. Topics that can be expressed in 6-12 minutes is a good length, but upwards of 20 mins is OK. As a general rule of thumb, a greater number of short videos is far preferable to a smaller number of long videos.
• Consider saving your slide topics into different files – this will make it easier to record, as you’ll be reminded when to start and stop recording, and encourage you to introduce and wrap up the topic.  

Make adjustments

• You might want to add more or less text and graphics to your slides, to improve clarity for students who can’t see you. More slides is better than fewer with big chunks of text, but you also need to account for things you might demonstrate physically in the classroom.
• Consider enlarging text – Chinese students in particular are overwhelmingly likely to access video content via phones, rather than on a laptop.
• Make sure the bottom cm or two is clear on your slides – the university is aiming to produce closed captioning for all video resources, so we want to avoid these obscuring important information. 
• Remove things that might be better expressed as text, discussions or other activities. If the videos focus on core content, you can share the questions and activities in Canvas or Teams to encourage online interaction. 
• Add animations (if you have time). You can actually use PowerPoint/Keynote’s object appearance order, drawings (boxes, arrows etc.) to make your videos more dynamic, control the pace and draw attention to different areas. Build the additional features into your slides and it will record them as you play through. 

Schedule your recordings

• Plan your distribution calendar – you don’t have to make all your content available at once. Nor are you locked in to the on-campus timetable. It might be feasible to delay releasing all your materials until Week 2 or 3, or release several upfront. The most important thing is you communicate expectations with your students.
• Book a time or a microphone – if your content is ready, you may want to record in one go, or book a repeating session at the same time each week.

• Use a microphone – From a technical perspective, the number one difference between a low quality and high quality recording is audio. Viewers will forgive fuzzy visuals, as long as they can hear clearly. If you’re recording on your own device, you can borrow one of our microphones, and many faculties can provide them. You can also book a repeat session in our sound-proof booth.
• Record your lessons using Kaltura Capture – There are several tools for DIY screen recording including: PowerPoint’s screen recording feature (Windows), Quicktime on MacOS, and the Windows 10 Game Bar. Our recommendation is to record and share your lessons using the Kaltura Capture application. Once you finish recording your lesson, whether your source is Powerpoint, Google Slides, or any other application, all you need to do is update the video details and click ‘Save and Upload’. This will save the video to your ‘My Media’ collection and you can proceed to embed the video in Canvas.
• If you have existing videos you can upload them to Kaltura and proceed to embed them as before on Canvas.
• If you need a local copy of your video you can also download a copy of the video and edit, compress or distribute as needed.

• Trim the start and end (most recorders give you the option to – it just makes it a bit more polished)
• If you’re making them yourself, get the files over to us in the LX.lab Media Team. You can drop them off on a thumb drive to the LX.lab during opening hours, or drop them in a OneDrive folder and share the link with us via ServiceConnect.
• We’ll compress them so that there are three options for distribution: streaming (via Kaltura); file download (<100mb); email attachment (<20mb). While you may not need all three, this will provide several fallback options in case students are having access difficulties.
• Add captions – you can find instructions on automatically creating and editing captions with Kaltura.