Using multimedia - Supporting your students
Using multimedia in your teaching can provide a lot of benefits for your students as it can provide them with flexibility in their learning, supplemental materials, opportunities to check their understanding, and add a more personalised experience. There are a number of ways that you can support your students.
Provide closed captions for your videos
In order to accommodate for language barriers, learning, visual or auditory disabilities, it is essential that you provide closed captioning to videos or share a transcript of the video. Panopto has the ability to easily add closed captioning to your videos. Having this option will provide a more accessible learning experience for your students.
Prepare an video introduction to your unit
Video is a great way for students to get to know you better and provide a more personal association to their educator. Having a video that introduces who you are, your research or educational experience and a little something personal can help foster connection and create trust between you and your students.
Share video or audio feedback
In addition to written feedback, your students would greatly benefit from receiving video or audio feedback on their assessments. This shows students that you value their contributions and provides them with more personalised and targeted feedback. This can be done as a short video with overall feedback on their assessment or as a screen capture where you walk them through the assessment and highlight areas of improvement. The key to feedback is that students can take the feedback and have an opportunity to improve on their assessment.
Create opportunities to check understanding
Using multimedia in your teaching can open up opportunities to create engaging and interactive learning activities. You can add a layer of interactivity within a video by embedding quiz questions to check their understanding or reinforce important concepts. Both H5P and Panopto allow you to embed quizzing directly onto the videos.
Get student to generate multimedia content
Another way to support or engage students is by getting them to create multimedia content. This can provide opportunities for students to take ownership of their own learning and contribute to the learning experience of all students in the unit. This could be done as part of their assessment task in the unit or as an assessment for learning activity. You can get students to create a video, a website, a podcast, a poster or another type of digital artifact. Whatever you decide on, make sure that it aligns to the unit learning outcomes, that there is a rationale for it being created in such a format and that students have access to the appropriate tools to create the multimedia content.