LeaderMOOC Behind The Scenes: Video killed the ecourse star

We are a few weeks from the start of LeaderMOOC now, our pilot to use the Massive Open Online Course format for scaling up leadership development (which is all about behavior change rather than academic insights). So far so good, but the clock is of course ticking. Last week the project core team spend a week together to iron out the design, create the course in the Canvas.net platform, and shoot some more videos. It's going to be a great experience! (also for us...) In this episode of 'behind the MOOC', I wanted to share our approach to video making for our MOOC.

Image: one of our anchors in front of the camera.

Video and video is two

We never really debated the use of videos in LeaderMOOC. Short videos are rapidly becoming the language of the Internet, and it is a well established practice in other MOOCs. So we will also use video as the main communication channel, supported with further small texts, downloads and links for deeper understanding and with the usual suite of discussion and assignments in-between. The question however was what quality and style to use. Shall we go for the TV Studio quality, or for the expert-speaking-to-his-smartphone style of videos? A glance at our budget was enough to know that using TV studio quality (with the scripting, lights, professional microphone and professional editing,...) was far out of our reach. We don't have a 6 figure budget. At the other hand, CCL has a brand image of high quality to maintain. So in the end we came up with the following compromise: we use a more professional style shooting for the beginning "setting the stage" and ending "making sense" video of the week, and a more grassroot video approach for the various experts of CCL and outside CCL that shine their light on the topic. These grassroot videos can be captured by our faculty themselves, or via Skype calls, etc. We then do a light editing to enhance the quality a bit such as noise reduction, adding logo and names and some headings, and converting it to the right resolution.

The face of LeaderMOOC

Most cMOOCs are about the (star) professor and their (star) course. CCL doesn't work in that model so we adopted an approach of 'CCL is its people' and will have a multitude of our faculty appearing over the 8 weeks, each sharing their insights and expertise on a particular topic. As that might be perceived confusing for people taking LeaderMOOC, we also wanted a 'familiar face' to go along with you on the entire journey, and referring you to various experts along the way. So similar to a TV show, we have a 'host' or 'anchor' that sets the week, and concludes it and a variety of other speakers in-between. The 2 hosts were chosen after a public announcement in the entire organisation on who wanted to take up this role. Thank you Paula and Kat!

What I learned about making videos

We took advice from a video consultant on how to make our 'cheap' videos as professional as possible within the limits of time and budget. So here is what I learned and wanted to share:

• Most people will say the image quality is the most important in videos, but that is not really the case: people are more upset when either the sound or the light are inferior.
• So as a best practice: make sure the place you are shooting the video in doesn't have distracting sounds (fans, airco, computer noise, people passing, the elevator...), consider buying a proper microphone instead of using the build-in one and use a video editing tool to remove noise afterwards. Most video editing tools have this (the free Windows Movie Maker unfortunately doesn't. The open source Audacity sound editor does a good job but you have to export and import the sound track separately.)
• Also make sure there is light in front and/or above the person you are filming, not behind. Check in the little window how it looks because colors may be different when filmed. Most cameras have excellent automatic settings now so we didn't touch them.
• There is something like the rule of 3: instead of having the person stand in the middle of the frame, divide the frame in 3 and stand on either one of the sided. This and other tips are also well explained in the Vimeo Video School. 
• All the videos will stream from YouTube, and we'll upload them in MP4 format, 1280x720 in a 16:9 aspect ratio.

In case you are wondering what we use: we have a JVC Everio camera that shoots in full HD (which we already had in the office), a tripod to mount it on (we also had that in the office for use in our programs), we borrowed the lights form one of our colleagues who is also a professional photographer, bought a wireless lavalier microphone that doesn't record background noise or surroundings (this mic from Audio Technica was recommended), and use Camtasia Studio 8 (300 US$) for the light editing stuff and Adobe Premiere 10 (you can purchase that month by month with a cloud license) for the heavy editing stuff. We also use the iPad app Teleprompt + and flipcharts in the background for our anchors to keep track of what they are saying.

This image shows you how scary the world looks from the perspective of our MOOC anchor.


PS And we surpassed already our internal goal of 1000 enrollments!

Previously:
LeaderMOOC Behind the Scenes : Platform choice and registrations