The never-ending challenge of the video lecture

There is nothing worse in online education than a bad video lecture. This is a claim that needs no support, not if you've ever experienced the brain fog and wandering thoughts and heavy eyelids and overwhelming sense of deadening obligation uniquely generated by the monotonous drone of a back-lit talking head swimming in digital artifact while overexplaining an overpacked slide in a tinny, echoing voice. The ongoing challenge, of course, is that a poorly-executed video lecture is dead easy, while producing a quality online video presentation is not. But if you are a teacher, presenter, producer, instructional designer, or product developer in this space and these times, you really have no choice but to put in the work. Downshift into low gear, let out the clutch, put the pedal down and power yourself out of the boring muck.   

Here are my top five key elements for video lectures, from hard-won experience. 

1. Audio first. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, the quality of your audio is actually more important than the quality of your video. Think of it this way, if all else goes south at least a learner can pop in their earbuds and take a long, invigorating walk. But if the audio is hard to take for long stretches, you're sunk before you leave the harbor. Good audio is always the backbone of good video.

2. Bits and bites. Don't ask anyone to watch a 20, 30, or 60-minute video. The only thing people ever watch in their real lives for even thirty minutes straight are things produced with multi-milion dollar budgets. You aren't in a classroom, no matter where your video was recorded. You're on someone's laptop, or phone, or tablet, or television. You're in their space, competing with the next installment of Mission Impossible. Don't compete. Cut your presentation up into small, proccessable chunks that match the content. Make it hard on yourself so it's easy on them.

3. Eye contact. A presenter on video actually has an enormous advantage over a presenter in a classroom in this one, important regard: you can look every person in the eye all the time. Or at least, that's how participants percieve it whenever you are looking at the camera. This is powerful. Take advantage of it, even if it means practicing until you are finally comfortable gazing cheerfully into that black hole of a camera lens.  

4. The right light. Pay attention to what you look like, just as you would if you were getting a portrait taken by a professional photographer. It doesn't need to look formal; it just needs to look good. Three-point lighting is what people expect, even though they may not know it. It's the professional standard we see all the time, the unconscious bar that, when you fall short of it, tells people this is an amateur production: Key light, fill light, back light. In many cases, bad lighting is simply back and fill light without any key light. Add that, and you're golden. Here's what Wikipedia knows.

5. Good graphics. Nothing says "I don't care" quite so eloquently as a long series of text-only slides read aloud. Make sure your slides are visually appealing, and don't overpack them. Don't read them verbatim. Use bullet points that require further explanation. Annotate as you teach, underline, circle, draw stars and exclamation points. Not everything is equally important; accentuate the big ideas. Add graphs, add images. The students pictured above were generated with Microsoft's Copilot. Fun and easy.

The list goes on, but these are at the top. And always remember, the lecture portion will never be the most engaging part of your course no matter what you do. The greatest payoff will come from time, energy, creativity, and resources that you invest in developing activities and assignments that truly spark the imagination.