COETAIL: Creating Creative Writing Videos

Another post toward obtaining my Certificate in Educational Technology and Information Literacy (COETAIL)

With a family health situation requiring me to temporarily relocate to the U.S. midway through the Japanese university semester, I was recently tasked with handing over five of my six courses to substitute instructors and hurriedly determining which tasks and assessments I would maintain supervision of and which would be left to substitutes. My sixth course, Creative Writing--Fiction, is the one course that I will continue to teach solo, online, for the remainder of the semester.

I was actually eager to take on the challenge of converting a traditional face-to-face university course to an online format, though the compressed time frame for submitting detailed lesson plans to the dean and having to immediately create a Wiki and implement the plans was rather gray-hair inducing.

One challenge I created for myself was to commit to posting weekly class videos. Students will view a video at the beginning of each week's virtual class time. When submitting my plans for the online meetings of the course, I listed weekly videos with topics that were deliberately broad and open-ended-- outlining, character, details, revising and editing, etc., knowing that I may ultimately change to a more specific focus as I actually create each video.

My aim in creating these videos for my creative writing classes is to ensure that students continue to "see" me, feel connected to the course, and remain inspired and motivated to write innovative, original short fiction--even without the face-to-face class dynamics and direct peer and teacher reinforcement. The videos serve as one small component of the online classes.

Currently I am mulling my approach in these weekly videos. The first video about creating an outline or plot plan for a short story was simply of me talking to the students using iMovie--I gave a brief description of the assignment and elaborated on points explained on the Wiki.  The second video was similar--me talking to the students about the assignment to do a character study of their story's main character. In the second video I added a few props. In both videos, I limited my speaking to under ten minutes--for my Japanese students this provides the right amount of listening practice without boring them, I hope, and reinforces the written guidelines and instructions on the class WikiSpaces site.

So . . . cringe . . . embarrassingly rough and goofy though it is, here is my class video on Character, created for my Japanese university creative writing students.



Obviously I'd like to be able to produce more polished and clever videos, but this is what I was able to accomplish under my present circumstances.

For one or two of the future videos I'd like to create some short tutorials, especially for demonstrating story editing and peer evaluation procedures. I will need to do some screen recording for those. I'm grateful for my COETAIL colleagues with their creative approaches and guidance in creating videos and tutorials; see this post from Student Centered Technology on "How to Create Video Tutorials"

I have a limited number of hours to devote to learning new techniques for creating these brief class videos, but I'll do my best. Feel free to share tips!