To teach to a diverse audience, “it’s good to have bite-sized content,” advises a Georgia Tech prof who has distilled his topics into short modules and “edu-bytes” of no more than 10 minutes. A Cal-Berkeley prof has reorganized his 90-minute lecture into 8-to-12-minute video segments, or “lecturelets”, each covering a topic with 1-2 self-check questions. Evidence from the field suggests shorter is sweeter. New data from edX, a nonprofit MOOC provider created by MIT and Harvard, for instance, put the optimal length for lecturelets at 6 to 9 minutes. Median viewing time, where half the students watch the entire clip, peaks at 6 minutes, then falls rapidly.
MOOCs require “a huge amount of work,” adds a UC Davis prof who devotes two full days preparing each 60-to 90-minute lecture. To maximize his instruction time, he writes 8 pages covering not only exactly what he will say, including jokes, but what he will draw. It takes 8 hours to record the lecture, stopping, starting, and rewriting as necessary. The editing crew needs 32 hours to synchronize the audio, screen casts, and video into a complete lecture. It takes 5 to 10 hours to produce each hourlong lecture video.
We are all well aware of the need to spark up our lectures, be they in a small class, a lecture hall, or on-line. Jay and I believe our 35 short company videos and many of the exercises we note in this blog (look back to the scores of Teaching Tips posts over the past 3 years) may help create an exciting classroom atmosphere.