Students need transferable skills to effectively communicate their discipline content effectively. This includes an understanding of academic language and literacy conventions, research skills, and research methodologies. Through the creation of short, videos published on YouTube, students can access and learn these concepts in a simple and engaging way— right when they need it.
Watch Lynette Pretorious explain how used just-in-time learning in her teaching.
As an Academic Language and Literacy Advisor in the Faculty of Education, I work with students to improve their approaches to their assessments - especially when they are transitioning into Higher Education, and unfamiliar with academic conventions (both implicit and explicit).
This involves helping them understand the task, read and take good quality notes, write in a style expected, and reference appropriately. I also work with research students to develop their research skills and their understanding of research methodologies.
I found that students were often asking the same questions such as “How do I write in an academic style?”, “How do I reference this source correctly?”, or “What goes in this section of a thesis?”. This highlighted that there was a need for students to have access to answers for their questions in a quick and accessible format.
| Create YouTube channel I knew that students preferred quick video examples to written information. I decided to create my own YouTube channel with short videos addressing each of the most common questions I received. I have also created YouTube playlists as collections of videos that were related (e.g., all the referencing videos in one place). |
| Make content public I chose to make the videos publicly available on YouTube, as I knew that there are students who would not necessarily approach a teacher for advice, but would be likely to type the topic into Google or YouTube to see which results appeared. |
| Use a variety of styles I created these videos in various styles - some are recordings with PowerPoint slides while others are animated cartoons using PowToon. There are already more than 60 videos in this channel and I continue to add to it as new questions arise from students. |
| Reuse the content My videos are now embedded in Moodle through the Academic Language Resources Bank which is available to all students. The videos are also incorporated into other lecturers/tutors coursework materials. I have also received requests from various other institutions to use my videos in their courses, too. |
With nearly 1 million views over the lifetime of the channel until September 2022. Over 6800 subscribers in 2022 are notified of new videos when they are published. The channel averages approximately 21,000 views a month.
I receive many positive comments as well as a lot of thankful emails from students. Students appreciate the clarity and simplicity of the videos. Students often also re-watch the videos when they discover they need some additional information at that point in time.
I also get students asking me questions and suggesting new videos through YouTube’s comments. This continues to inspire me to create content and share in this way. Students share the content with each other.
"To explain such complex theory in a 3 minute clip is an amazing achievement. Thank you so much, this video helped me a lot to understand this theory!"
"This is like the 5th time I'm watching this. Basically every time before I have to write sometime for my doctorate. LOL"
“Thank you very much for this video! It helped me understand what my lecturers want from me!”
This exemplar requires a medium level of effort to implement.
Recommended resources:
The resources available in this channel are applicable to all Faculties. While there are discipline-specific conventions, academic language and literacy, as well as research skills are transferable across discipline.
Any Faculty staff member could use this same type of short, targeted videos to convey their discipline-specific content in easy to understand ways.
Here are three videos from the YouTube channel that you can browse to experience this teaching activity.
