How I make screencasts: The whiteboard screencast

In this post, the fifth in a series of posts on how I make screencasts, I’m going to focus on what I call the “whiteboard” screencast. This is a screencast where I am demoing some sort of concept or calculation by writing things down, rather than clicking through a Keynote presentation or typing something on the screen. It’s intended to mimic the live presentation of content on a whiteboard, hence my name for it.

Of course the most well-known examples of “whiteboard” screencasts are the videos at Khan Academy. In the unlikely event you haven’t seen a Khan Academy video before, here’s one:

I do whiteboard screencasts fairly often. I use them sometimes for presenting hand calculations for students to watch and work through before class, and sometimes (probably more frequently) I use them to create additional examples for things I’ve covered in class. This is a really powerful use of screencasts — students often want more examples than there is time for in a class meeting, and whiteboard screencasts give me a way to give students as many examples as they can dream up.

The basic principles of whiteboard screencasts are the same as for other screencasts. You first have to engage in basic planning, which involves defining a tight and coherent scope for your screencast and writing out a script. For whiteboard screencasting, which is more free-form than lecture capture using Keynote or PowerPoint, the scripting process has to be a little more rigorous. Because it’s easy for me to get carried away when talking about something that matters to me, I find it very helpful to work out in advance everything that I am going to do in the screencast, in the order and position on the screen that I intend to do it. I don’t always read words from a script, but in order to make the screencast logical and coherent, I do storyboard what I am going to do and practice with the drawings, erasures, and such. Very little of what I do in a whiteboard screencast is ad-libbed. (If I were better at ad-libbing, that might be different.)

So I will start a whiteboard screencast with something like a mind-map of the topic or topics I intend to address and one, maybe two, examples of that topic. Additional topics go into additional screencasts. I work those examples all the way through to ensure that there are no math or other mistakes and that I don’t get stuck in one of my own calculations. If you think about it, this is just the same kind of planning that goes into a successful whiteboard lecture, so this process is not entirely alien to instructors.

Once the screencast is properly planned, it’s time to put it together. This is where it gets technically somewhat complicated. But a lot of people ask me about the tools I use to make whiteboard screencasts, so hopefully this will be worth it. I use four main tools for doing whiteboard screencasts:

• Keynote; I’ll explain in a minute.
• Camtasia, which we saw in the last post in this series.
• FlySketch, a software app from Flying Meat (they also make the popular personal wiki software VoodooPad). FlySketch puts a transparent overlay on top of any existing objects on your computer screen and allows you to draw freehand, draw geometric shapes, or type text on the overlay. See the link for screenshots and a more detailed description.
• A Wacom pen tablet. I currently a Wacom Graphire tablet purchased with a grant a few years ago. With my upcoming job change, I have to hand that in when I leave, so I plan on picking up a Bamboo Pen & Touch this fall.

With those tools, here is the workflow I follow for making a whiteboard screencast.

First, open up Keynote and make a single, blank white slide. This is going to be the “whiteboard” itself. Of course you could also use a blank MS Word document, or any other blank white window or screen. Keynote is just for convenience’s sake.

Next, open up FlySketch and lay it completely over the blank window so that the controls are showing above the top of the window:

Then, open Camtasia and create a custom region that encompasses the “whiteboard”. When the video rolls, it will record what is happening on the whiteboard:

And finally — start the video, and start writing on the FlySketch overlay using the Wacom tablet. Before you start recording, make sure to select the pen color and size you want. If you need to change color, size, or pen type during the screencast — say, you want to switch from freehand writing to typing, or drawing a straight line for an axis — you can tap on the appropriate FlySketch control and Camtasia won’t record it because it’s off-screen.

Then you simply record what you need, then stop, and process the video as was described in the previous post in this series. This includes editing out any mistakes and splicing together multiple video clips for the same screencast.

Here’s an example of the finished product:

Although Sal Khan has been my inspiration for doing screencasts, I’ve made some conscious decisions here to do things differently than Khan does. First, I prefer the white background to the black; it’s more familiar to learners and seems cleaner. I also tend to use thicker pen “tips” than Khan does; I tend to think his pens look a little spidery. Also, the Wacom tablet pen is pressure-sensitive, and that feature works better if the pen tip is thicker. Finally, from a planning perspective, my whiteboard screencasts are a lot less conversational than Khan’s videos. Khan tends to shoot from the hip in terms of presentation; this is part of what makes his videos so charming, but I think it also tends to make his videos go longer than they need to. I prefer to make things a bit more efficient and focused and take less time. It also cuts down on mistakes.

I think the hardest part of this process, for me, was mastering the art of writing on the Wacom tablet in one place and having the writing appear on the screen. This is harder than it sounds! At first my handwriting was horrible (I think at the time I likened it to somebody with a brain injury) but eventually I got my act together. I suspect people learning to play the drums or the piano have to go through the same process before it sounds any good.

Another challenge is managing the relatively small amount of physical space you are working with. A Keynote slide is just not a very large place, and it’s easy to run out of room when writing. If this happens, it can be dealt with by just starting another slide and creating a new video clip. But it’s better for the learner to see one example per slide if possible, and making sure this happens is part of that all-important planning process. I find it helpful to practice the presentation not on the screen or a piece of paper but on a 3 x 5 inch notecard, which has something much closer the same proportions for writing as the Keynote slide on the screen. But note that it does take practice — if you just sit down and try to bang out a whiteboard screencast, it’s likely not to be as good or as instructional as possible, and it could end up taking more time in terms of edits and re-takes than it would if you just planned and practiced in the first place.

I’d be interested in hearing any alternative approaches for making these kinds of screencasts. I once wrote Sal Khan and asked him what his tools were, but never got a response, so I just reverse-engineered what he was doing. There may be a better way. Let me know!

Next up will be the final installment in this series, touching on what I called a “demo” screencast. It’s probably what I do the most. Stay tuned!

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Thoughts on the culture of an inverted classroom

I’ve just finished up the spring semester, and with it the second iteration of the inverted classroom MATLAB course. With my upcoming move, it may be a while before I teach another course like this (although my experiments with targeted “flipping” went pretty well), so I am taking special care to unwind and document how things went both this year and last.

I asked the students in this year’s class about their impressions of the inverted classroom — how it’s worked for them, what could be improved, and so on.  The responses fell into one of two camps: Students who were unsure of, or resistant to, the inverted classroom approach at first but eventually came to appreciate its use and get a lot out of the approach (that was about 3/4 of the class), and students who maybe still learned a lot in the class but never bought in to the inverted method. No matter what the group, one thing was a common experience for the students: an initial struggle with the method. This was definitely the case last year as well, although I didn’t document it. Most students found closure to that struggle and began to see the point, and even thrived as a result, while some struggled for the whole semester. (Which, again, is not to say they struggled academically; most of the second group of students had A’s and B’s as final grades.)

So I am asking, What is the nature of that struggle? Why does it happen? How can I best lead students through it if I adopt the inverted classroom method? And, maybe most importantly, does this struggle matter? That is, are students better off as problem solvers and lifelong learners for having come to terms with the flipped classroom approach, or is adopting this approach just making students have to jump yet another unnecessary hurdle, and they’d be just as well off with a traditional approach and therefore no struggle?

I think that the nature of the struggle with the inverted classroom is mainly cultural. I am using the anthropologists’ definition of “culture” when I say that — a culture being a system whereby a group of people assign meaning and value to things.

In particular, the way culture places value on the teacher is radically different between the traditional academic culture experienced by students and the culture that is espoused by the inverted classroom. In the traditional classroom, what makes a “good teacher” is typically that teacher’s ability to lecture in a clear way and give assessments that gauge basic knowledge of the lecture. In other words, the teacher’s value hinges on his or her ability to talk.

In the inverted classroom, by contrast, what makes a “good teacher” is his or her ability to create good materials and then coach the students on the fly as they breeze through some things and get inexplicably hung up on others. In other words, the teacher’s value hinges on his or her ability to listen.

Many students who are in that other 25% who never buy into the inverted classroom think that teachers using this approach are not “real” teachers at all. As one student put it, when they pay a teacher their salary, they expect the teacher to actually teach. What is meant by “teaching” here is an all-important question. Well, on the reverse side, if there were such a thing as a group of students who had only experienced the inverted classroom their entire lives and then entered into a traditional classroom, those students would think they are experiencing the worst teacher in the history of academia. The guy never shuts up! He only talks, talks, talks! We have to fight to get a word in edgewise, we get only brief chances to work on things when he is there, and we’re always booted unceremoniously out of the lecture hall (we used to call them “classrooms”) and left to fend for ourselves on all this difficult homework!

I’m convinced that bridging this cultural gap is what takes up most of the time and effort in an inverted classroom — forget about screencasts!

Targeting the inverted classroom approach

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A while back I wondered out loud whether it was possible to implement the inverted or “flipped” classroom in a targeted way. Can you invert the classroom for some portions of a course and keep it “normal” for others? Or does inverting the classroom have to be all-or-nothing if it is to work at all? After reading the comments on that piece, I began to think that the targeted approach could work if you handled it right. So I gave it a shot in my linear algebra class (that is coming to a close this week).

The grades in the class come primarily from in-class assessments and take-home assessments. The former are like regular tests and the latter are more like take-home tests with limited collaboration. We had online homework through WeBWorK but otherwise I assigned practice exercises from the book but didn’t take them up. The mix of timed and untimed assessments worked well enough, but the lack of collected homework was not giving us good results. I think the students tended to see the take-home assessments as being the homework, and the WeBWorK and practice problems were just something to look at.

What seemed true to me was that, in order for a targeted inverted classroom approach to work, it has to be packaged differently and carry the weight of significant credit or points in the class. I’ve tried this approach before in other classes but just giving students reading or videos to watch and telling them we’d be doing activities in class rather than a lecture — even assigning  minor credit value to the in-class activity — and you can guess what happened: nobody watched the videos or read the material. The inverted approach didn’t seem different enough to the students to warrant any change in their behaviors toward the class.

So in the linear algebra class, I looked ahead at the course schedule and saw there were at least three points in the class where we were dealing with material that seemed very well-suited to an inverted approach: determinants, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and inner products. These work well because they start very algorithmically but lead to fairly deep conceptual ideas once the algorithms are over. The out-of-class portions of the inverted approach, where the ball is in the students’ court, can focus on getting the algorithm figured out and getting a taste of the bigger ideas; then the in-class portion can focus on the big ideas. This seems to put the different pieces of the material in the right context — algorithmic stuff in the hands of students, where it plays to their strengths (doing calculations) and conceptual stuff neither in a lecture nor in isolated homework experiences but rather in collaborative work guided by the professor.

To solve the problem of making this approach seem different enough to students, I just stole a page from the sciences and called them “workshops“. In preparation for these three workshops, students needed to watch some videos or read portions of their textbooks and then work through several guided practice exercises to help them meet some baseline competencies they will need before the class meeting. Then, in the class meeting, there would be a five-point quiz taken using clickers over the basic competencies, followed by a set of in-class problems that were done in pairs. A rough draft of work on each of the in-class problems was required at the end of the class meeting, and students were given a couple of days to finish off the final drafts outside of class. The whole package — guided practice, quiz, rough draft, and final draft — counted as a fairly large in-class assessment.

Of course this is precisely what I did every week in the MATLAB course. The only difference is that this is the only way we did things in the MATLAB course. In linear algebra this accounted for three days of class total.

Here are the materials for the workshops we did. The “overview” for each contains a synopsis of the workshop, a list of videos and reading to be done before class, and the guided practice exercises.

• Determinants: Here’s the overview and here are the in-class problems.
• Eigenvalues and eigenvectors: Overview, in-class problems.
• Inner products: Overview, in-class problems.

The results were really positive. Students really enjoyed doing things this way — it’s way more engaging than a lecture and there is a lot more support than just turning the students out of class to do homework on their own. As you can see, many of the guided practice exercises were just exercises from the textbook — the things I had assigned before but not taken up, only to have them not done at all. Performance on the in-class and take-home assessments went up significantly after introducing workshops.

Additionally, we have three mastery exams that students have to pass with 100% during the course — one on row-reduction, another on matrix operations, and another on determinants. Although determinants form the newest and in some ways the most complex material of these exams, right now that exam has the highest passing rate of the three, and I credit a lot of that to the workshop experience.

So I think the answer to the question “Can the inverted classroom be done in a targeted way?” is YES, provided that:

• The inverted approach is used in distinct graded assignments that are made to look and feel very distinct from other elements of the course.
• Teachers make the expectations for out-of-class student work clear by giving an unambiguous list of competencies prior to the out-of-class work.
• Quality video or reading material is found and used, and not too much of it is assigned. Here, the importance of choosing a textbook — if you must do so — is very important. You have to be able to trust that students can read their books for comprehension on their own outside of class. If not, don’t get the book. I used David Lay’s excellent textbook, plus a mix of Khan Academy videos and my own screencasts.
• Guided practice exercises are selected so that students experience early success when grappling with the material out of class. Again, textbook selection should be made along those lines.
• In-class problems are interesting, tied directly to the competency lists and the guided practice, and are doable within a reasonable time frame.

These would serve as guidelines for any inverted classroom approach, but they are especially important for making sure that student learning is as great or greater than the traditional approach — and again, the idea of distinctness seems to be the key for doing this in a targeted way.

What are your suggestions or experiences about using the inverted or “flipped” classroom in a targeted way like this?

Speaking of the inverted classroom

On Wednesday, I gave a talk at Indiana University – Purdue Universty – Indianapolis (IUPUI, for short) to the teaching seminar for math graduate students on the inverted classroom. It was sort of a generalization of the talk I gave on the inverted linear algebra classroom back at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January. Carl Cowen was in attendance at that talk and invited me to make the 20-minute drive from my house to IUPUI to do something like it, and I was happy to oblige.

Since putting the talk up on Slideshare yesterday morning, it’s gotten over 200 views, 2 favorites, a handful of retweets/Facebook likes, and is currently being highlighted on Slideshare’s Education page. So I thought I would share it here as well. Enjoy and ask questions!

Five questions I haven’t been able to answer yet about the inverted classroom

Between the Salman Khan TED talk I posted yesterday and several talks I saw at the ICTCM a couple of weeks ago, it seems like the inverted classroom idea is picking up some steam. I’m eager myself to do more with it. But I have to admit there are at least five questions that I have about this method, the answers to which I haven’t figured out yet.

1. How do you get students on board with this idea who are convinced that if the teacher isn’t lecturing, the teacher isn’t teaching? For that matter, how do you get ANYBODY on board who are similarly convinced?

Because not all students are convinced the inverted classroom approach is a good idea or that it even makes sense. Like I said before, the single biggest point of resistance to the inverted classroom in my experience is that vocal group of students who think that no lecture = no teaching. You have to convince that group that what’s important is what (and whether) they are learning, as opposed to my choices for instructional modes, but how?

2. Which is better: To make your own videos for the course, or to use another person’s videos even if they are of a better technical or pedagogical quality? (Or can the two be effectively mixed?)

There’s actually a bigger question behind this, and it’s the one people always ask when I talk about the inverted classroom: How much time is this going to take me? On the one hand, I can use Khan Academy or iTunesU stuff just off the rack and save myself a ton of time. On the other hand, I run the risk of appearing lazy to my students (maybe that really would be being lazy) or not connecting with them, or using pre-made materials that don’t suit my audience. I spend 6-12 hours a week just on the MATLAB class’ screencasts and would love (LOVE) to have a suitable off-the-shelf resource to use instead. But how would students respond, both emotionally and pedagogically?

3. Can the inverted classroom be employed in a class on a targeted basis — that is, for one or a handful of topics — or does it really only work on an all-or-nothing basis where the entire course is inverted?

I’ve tried the former approach, to teach least-squares solution methods in linear algebra and to do precalculus review in calculus. In the linear algebra class it was successful; in calculus it was a massive flop. On some level I’m beginning to think that you have to go all in with the inverted classroom or students will not feel the accountability for getting the out-of-class work done. At the very least, it seems that the inverted portions of the class have to be very distinct from the others — with their own grading structure and so on. But I don’t know.

4. Does the inverted classroom model fit in situations where you have multiple sections of the same course running simultaneously?

For example, if a university has 10 sections of calculus running in the Fall, is it feasible — or smart — for one instructor to run her class inverted while the other nine don’t? Would it need to be, again, an all-or-nothing situation where either everybody inverts or nobody does, in order to really work? I could definitely see me teaching one or two sections of calculus in the inverted mode, with a colleague teaching two other sections in traditional mode, and students who fall under the heading described in question #1 would wonder how they managed to sign up for such a cockamamie way of “teaching” the subject, and demand a transfer or something. When there’s only one section, or one prof teaching all sections of a class, this doesn’t come up. But that’s a relatively small portion of the full-time equivalent student population in a math department.

5. At what point does an inverted classroom course become a hybrid course?

This matters for some instructors who teach in institutions where hybrid, fully online, and traditional courses have different fee structures, office hours expectations, and so on. This question raises ugly institutional assumptions about student learning in general. For example, I had a Twitter exchange recently with a community college prof whose institution mandates that a certain percentage of the content must be “delivered” in the classroom before it becomes a “hybrid” course. So, the purpose of the classroom is to deliver content? What happens if the students don’t “get” the content in class? Has the content been “delivered”? That’s a very 1950’s-era understanding of what education is supposedly about. But it’s also the reality of the workplaces of a lot of people interested in this idea, so you have to think about it.

Got any ideas on these questions?

Salman Khan on the inverted classroom

Salman Khan, of the Khan Academy, sounds off on the potential of pre-recorded video lectures to change education in the video below. He calls it “flipping” the classroom, but around here we call it the inverted classroom.

I like especially that Salman made the point that the main effect of inverting the classroom is to humanize it. Rather than delivering a one-size-fits-all lecture, the lecture is put where it will be of the most use to the greatest number of students — namely, online and outside of class — leaving the teacher free to focus on individual students during class. This was the point I made in this article — that the purpose of technology ought to be to enhance rather than replace human relationships.

I hope somewhere that he, or somebody, spends a bit more time discussing exactly how the teachers in the one school district he mentions in the talk actually implemented the inverted classroom, and what kinds of issues they ran up against. Ironically, the greatest resistance I get with the inverted classroom is from students themselves, namely a small but vocal group who believe that this sort of thing isn’t “real teaching”. I wonder if the K-12 teachers who use this model encounter that, or if it’s just a phenomenon among college-aged students.

Computers, the Internet, and the Human Touch

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This article first appeared earlier this week on the group blog Education Debate at OnlineSchools.org. I’m one of the guest bloggers over there now and will be contributing articles 1–2 times a month. I’ll be cross-posting those articles a couple of days after they appear. You’d enjoy going to Education Debate for a lively and diverse group of bloggers covering all kinds of educational issues.

It used to be that in order to educate more than a handful of people at the same time, schools had to herd them into large lecture halls and utilize the skills of lecturers to transmit information to them. Education and school became synonymous in this way. Lectures, syllabi, assessments, and other instruments of education were the tightly-held property of the universities.

But that’s changing. Thanks to advancements in media and internet technology over the past decade, it is simpler than ever today to package and publish the raw informational content of a course to the internet, making the Web in effect a lecture hall for the world. We now have projects such as MIT OpenCourseWare, Khan Academy, and countless initiatives for online education at US colleges and universities providing high-quality materials online, for free, to whomever wants them. It brings up a sometimes-disturbing question among educators: If students can get all this stuff online for free, what are classrooms and instructors for?

Tech author Randall Stross attempts to examine this question in his New York Times article “Online Courses, Still Lacking that Third Dimension”. In the article, Stross mentions “hybrid” courses — courses with both online and in-person components — but focuses mainly on self-contained courses done entirely online with no live human interaction. He correctly points out that learning is an inherently human activity, and technologically-enhanced coursework is successful insofar as it retains that “human touch”.

However, Stross casts the relationship between computer-enabled courses and traditional courses as a kind of zero-sum game, wherein an increased computer presence results in a decreased human presence. He refers to universities “adopting the technology that renders human instructors obsolete.” But it’s not the technology itself that makes instructors obsolete; it’s the adoption of practices of using that technology that does. There are numerous instances of traditional college courses using computing and internet tools to affect positive change in the learning culture of the institution. There are also plenty of cases, as Stross points out, where technology has replaced human instructors. The difference is an administrative one, not a technological one.

Nor is the supposed obsolescence of the instructor all technology’s fault. If universities and individual professors continue to hold on to a conception of “teaching” that equates to “mass communication” — using the classroom only to lecture and transmit information and nothing else — then both university and instructor are obsolete already, no technology necessary. They are obsolete because the college graduate of the 21st century does not need more information in his or her head to solve the problems that will press upon them in the next five or ten years. Instead, they need creativity, problem-solving experience, and high-order cognitive processing skills. A college experience based on sitting through lectures and working homework does not deliver on this point. The college classroom cannot, any longer, be about lecturing if it is to remain relevant.

And notice that an entirely self-contained online course can be as “traditional” as the driest traditional lecture course attended in person if it’s only a YouTube playlist of lectures. What matters regarding the effectiveness of a course isn’t the technology that is or is not being used. Instead it’s the assumptions about teaching and learning held by the colleges and instructors that matter, and their choices in translating those assumptions to an actual class that students pay for.

What we should be doing instead of choosing sides between computers and humans is finding ways to leverage the power of computers and the internet to enhance the human element in learning. There are several places where this is already happening:

• Livemocha is a website that combines quality multimedia content with social networking to help people learn languages. Users can watch and listen to language content that would normally find its place in a classroom lecture and then interact with native speakers from around the world to get feedback on their performance.
• Socrait, a system proposed by Maria Andersen, would provide personalized Socratic questions keyed to specific content areas by way of a “Learn This” button appended to existing web content, much like the “Like This” button for sharing content on Facebook. Clicking the button would bring the user to an interface to help the user learn the content, and the system contains social components such as identifying friends who also chose to learn the topic.
• I would offer my own experiments with the inverted classroom model of instruction as an imperfect but promising example as well. Research suggests this model can provide in significant gains in student learning versus the traditional approach to teaching by simply switching the contexts of lecture and activity, with lecture being delivered via video podcasts accessed outside of class and class time spent on problem-based learning activities in teams.

Rather than view college course structure as a pie divided into a computer piece and a human piece, and fret about the human piece becoming too small, let’s examine ways to use computers to enhance human learning. If we keep thinking of computers as a threat rather than an aid to human interaction, computer-assisted instruction will continue to lack the human touch, the human touch will continue to lack the power and resources of computers and the internet, and student learning will suffer. But if we get creative, the college learning experience could be in for a renaissance.

Is Khan Academy the future of education?

Salman Khan is a former financial analyst who quit his day job so that he could form Khan Academy — a venture in which he makes instructional videos on mathematics topics and puts them on YouTube. And he has certainly done a prolific job of it — to the tune of over a thousand short videos on topics ranging from basic addition to differential equations and also physics, biology, and finance.  Amazingly, he does this all on his own time, in a remodeled closet in his house, for free:

I can attest to the quality of his linear algebra videos, some of which I’ve embedded on the Moodle site for my linear algebra course. They are simple without being dumbed down, and what he says about the 10-minute time span in the PBS story is exactly right — it’s just the right length for a single topic.

What do you think about this? What role do well-produced, short, simple, free video lectures like this have in the future of education? Will they eventually replace classrooms as we know them? If not, will they eventually force major changes in the way classroom instruction is done, and if so, what kinds of changes?