Faculty-Created Micro-Lectures

Since I arrived at the University of Illinois College of Medicine (UICOM) in fall 2013, I have worked closely with our faculty to ensure they are prepared for teaching in different modalities. In the current UICOM curriculum, the number of traditional didactic lectures has been reduced in favor of more interactive teaching modalities. As we want students to come to interactive sessions prepared to participate in their own learning, some of the prep work they are required to do includes readings and videos to watch. For video content, some of them come from Osmosis, others are from YouTube or other sites.

We felt that we needed to supplement found video content that was more aligned with our curriculum – YouTube and other sources have a lot of educational content but sometimes you need something more specific. I have worked with our faculty at each campus to create hundreds of recorded short & succinct videos on targeted topics for students to view prior to class.

It was a little chaotic in the beginning as faculty were excited and scared to create video. My colleagues at the other campuses and I did numerous workshops and presentations (along with a lot of one-on-one work) with faculty, staff, and administration to help them to understand some best practices with video production.

Challenge: Many faculty felt that they would just be recording a traditional lecture and posting that for students to watch as prep work before coming to an active learning session.

would be useful for a kit to include hardware and software we know works well:

• a laptop with specific video recording & editing software
• microphone
• webcam

Unfortunately, we did not get funding for this aspect of the project (which is perpetual as we make new videos and update previous ones) – however, some faculty were able to obtain decent microphones for recording.

To ensure continued faculty buy-in and to create additional videos or update their existing ones, we share view statistics for recorded videos uploaded to our lecture capture system, Echo360 for student view, course evaluations, and peer evaluations to give a more detailed view of how these videos are utilized by students. Positive feedback has helped to encourage faculty to continue creating them and as they do, they get better at it.