Animating students with video projects they create

As college teaching shifts from old-school “Sage on the Stage” lectures to “Guide by the Side” active-learning projects, I developed a mostly successful small-group animated video exercise that could prove useful for other professors too.

I learned about animated video projects during a summer professor training at Santa Monica College. The facilitator led us through the process of creating 1–2 minute videos in Royal Society of Animation (RSA) style. Here’s the professional example he showed us: https://youtu.be/zDZFcDGpL4U.

Academic researchers have noted the benefits of video projects. I recommend Henry Greene and Cheryl Crespi's “The Value of Student-Created Videos in the College Classroom…” published in 2012 in the International Journal of Arts & Sciences.

The idea is to have each small group of students research a topic (in my case, a media theory or a section of the textbook) and create a short, animated video about it to educate their classmates. The project encourages teamwork, critical thinking, visualizing information and working with technology. At the same time, discussion-shy students, artists, and tech-savvy students get a chance to shine.

Since nearly all of my students are bilingual (or trilingual), I also give extra credit for bilingual or second versions of the videos in another language.

You can check out the student videos on my Youtube playlists: https://www.youtube.com/user/sobsatz/playlists.

The project worked great for most groups. The one semi-flop was a group with personality conflicts — they produced two different videos for the same theory.

I give my students three hours of class-time to work on the video. Here are the steps:

1. Divide the class into groups of 3–5 students each and assign each a theory or textbook section.

2. Let students use their phones, laptops or tablets to research the theory, agree on a definition and develop one real-world example their classmates will understand.

3. They show me their group’s definition and example. If it’s correct, they start work on the video. If not, I guide their further research.

4. Each group plans out/storyboards their video.

5. On white paper with markers, on the chalkboard or on the white board, the group creates the video and films it, usually with their smart phone camera.

6. The drawing takes longer than the end video, so they will speed up the visuals, either in iMovie or with an app such as Slow Fast Slow, before adding their audio.

7. One member of the group uploads the video to a laptop or campus computer

8. They record the audio with a phone or laptop, timing it to the video.

9. A student from each group finalizes the video using iMovie, Final Cut, Windows Moviemaker, etc… and uploads it to Youtube, makes it public and emails the link to me.

10. Students add captions either in iMovie, Adobe Premier or in Youtube after it is uploaded.

11. We watch all the videos in class while looking at a worksheet or exam review sheet with all the media theories, so they can match each theory with its definition after watching the video. They can review the videos at any time or I can embed them in the class website.

I am always amazed by their creativity.