Protocols and software for simplified educational video capture and editing

Abstract

Recently, educational videos have become important parts of e-learning systems which have in turn become widely used due to their flexibility. These videos should be of high quality since higher production values lead to superior learning outcomes. However, creating high-quality video is a difficult task for teachers since it needs technical knowledge that includes video recording and timeline usage. Hence, creating educational video production software, that is at the same time easy-to-use and able to produce high-quality educational videos, is very advantageous. In this paper, we developed protocols for an easy-to-use piece of software that enables teachers who have little technological background to produce their own educational videos autonomously. In fact, our contribution is to reduce the complexity of the whole video production process by introducing a preparation step based on micro-teaching and upstream specification. An evaluation of the software with six teachers is performed. This evaluation, based on think-aloud protocol and quantitative measurements, showed that the introduction of the preparation step allowed the participant teachers to produce high-quality educational videos in less than three hours.