Videos in my active learning classroom

This semester I concentrated on true flipping: Lectures were viewed outside of class, and when we met, it was to do an activity or an assessment. I did in fact do direct instruction twice, for a grand total of about one hour. I had a goal of zero hours, but considering the class is scheduled for 1h50m twice a week, keeping lectures down to one hour for the whole term was a pretty good accomplishment. I feel good about that.

I loved not talking so much.

I delivered lectures through video clips. I did NOT convert powerpoints into mp4s where I was a talking head embedded on slides. My format was essentially this:

Title card
Gag/joke/funny thing
Voiceover of dynamic visualization
Gag
What to do next/conclusion

I made 33 videos with on these topics: Topographic maps, Google Earth, glaciers, severe weather, Koeppen climates, timezones, tectonics, wind and the atmosphere, using spreadsheets and using a compass.

In making these videos, I discovered an oddly artistic side to myself. I really enjoyed crafting these things and I got really good at it. I immediately set to figuring out a way to make fun of myself for being all artsy-fartsy.

One day I was listening to a podcast I really enjoy: Who's This Now? With Jim Bruce. He's a comedian who interviews other comedians. One guest was comedian Brandie Posey--although it could have been Tess Parker--and she was talking about her days in film school, and about how serious and pretentious the student films were. She had made a parody film about "going to the meadow to find her childhood" and showed it to her class. The very next student film shown was by a girl who--you guessed it--went to a meadow to find her childhood. That film was not supposed to be funny. I thought the story was hilarious.

I immediately decided that I could simultaneously mock myself and create an end-of-semester FAQ video by making a parody of a film school project. Those of you who teach Introduction To Anything know that students have a predictable set of questions. Good questions, reasonable questions, but like clockwork they come:

-Do you round grades up?
-Is there any extra credit now?
-How do I figure my grade?
-Is the final comprehensive?
-When will grades be done?
-How many points are there?

And so on.

So I shot this in black and white to enhance the art-school seriousness. I even labored over the font, trying to figure out which one would be most pretentious in a 1980s-film-school way (whatever the HECK that means, but it turns out to be Courier with no drop shadow).

I added a mock "DVD Featurette Interview with the Artist" (me) at the end because I mostly find those things in real life to be worthy of ridicule. Couldn't pass that up.

So here's the video:

People my age find this unbearably hilarious. My wife was in tears, laughing so hard. My campus Instructional Design Guru laughed his cojones off. Those of us in our 40s have seen more than our share of crappy art films like this. I decided to take the risk and show it to my students. I've received very positive feedback from my videos, but I'd never watched them watch one.

My students seemed to find the sight gags funny, but didn't have much else to say about it. No commentary on the false pretension or the mock irony, etc. There might be a few things working together here:

-the "YouTube" generation doesn't get my art (trying to be funny here)
-they were still absorbing the fact that I don't round up grades
-they haven't seen the kind of crappy art films that we geezers have so it's not as funny.

I'm not sure if I'll show it again to students. Maybe.

Later on I'll post some more videos. This was a blast to make.