A new element in the online classroom

Key points:

Late on a recent Friday night while preparing my fall courses, I heard my cell phone chime–twice. I noticed the text was not from someone in my contacts list, which meant it was probably from one of my community college students. I noticed, too, that I already had a text history with the student.

The message read:

Hello sir, I hope this isn’t too late, but I have a tutorial video for your next class if you’d like to use it.

Seconds later, the follow-up:

It’s 15 minutes long and goes over everything anyone needs to know that wants to do videos and has a detailed analysis of our equipment and organization. 

The texts were from Stephen, a student who had completed both U.S. History I and II online with me last academic year as a high school junior, 1,000 miles away in Texas. Our last text exchange, now months ago, was about his final student recording project, a biographical video research presentation I call the Lest We Forget project.

It was not my final project that got Stephen and his friends interested in recording videos for my classes. Last year, I encouraged my group of dual credit high school learners to get together and take videos of a New Deal-era CCC or WPA project or site and post them to our online discussion board. A few students from Stephen’s class accepted the challenge. Unexpectedly, they recorded and posted video reflections on the discussion board the following week, and every week that followed. The quality of the student recordings they submitted soon improved, even when high school extracurriculars and family responsibilities pressed them for time. The number of classmates involved in the recording and editing process grew as well, and the medium expanded to allow for unexpected creativity (serialized plot lines, costumes, blooper reels, etc.). For their last weekly discussion board, they went out to a slow-casual restaurant, cameras and microphones recording, and discussed course-related topics ranging from the legacy of Jimmy Carter to the university protests over the fighting in Gaza over a 45-minute dinner. Most of the videos they shared were over 15 minutes in length and as polished as any YouTube video these students might watch in their free time.

I have been asking online learners to record and share their Lest We Forget presentations for twelve years. It has always felt risky to do this. When 4G cellular networks were still in their infancy, my rural high school students and their families sometimes struggled with bandwidth challenges and on-device storage limits. Student recordings were submitted under various family members’ YouTube accounts, and I inevitably served as impromptu finals week technical support. I persisted, despite the inconvenience, because I needed to see and hear them knowledgeably and responsibly discuss the American past as a capstone of their learning. I also wanted to empower them to share that new knowledge about their selected American historical figure with the rest of the world. (The project took on new significance beginning in the summer of 2020, when statues of various historical figures were defaced and pulled down across the country.) I always shared the strongest and most creative student recordings with my colleagues and friends at the end of each semester, hoping to pass along some of my optimism about the next generation of learners.

I had entered Stephen’s final grade last May, and yet, here he was, emailing me another link to a 15-minute YouTube video. Three former students had partnered for this new recording, and true to Stephen’s word, the bulk of the video is a tightly edited walkthrough of how their group had planned, filmed, edited, and uploaded all those videos to our learning management system last spring (something I am incredibly excited to share with my new batch of dual credit learners). The new video featured comedic call-backs to some of their previous discussion board submissions, but it also reflected on the real-life departure of one of their classmates (John), whose family had moved out of the school district over summer.

At another community college I teach for, the learning management system’s suite of recording options has enabled me to make student video recording a central method of evaluating student learning. It would be natural to compare these student recordings to oral examinations, which were more commonly used in higher education decades ago; “oral assessment” is how academic scholarship tended to describe discussion-based evaluations of student learning delivered virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Asynchronous and untethered student recording, however, seems to introduce a new element into the online classroom. In the hands of anyone eager to learn, a camera and a microphone can become an inherently flexible and creative means by which understanding can be demonstrated. It has, surprisingly, also become a conduit through which many online students openly share their genuine hopes, fears, frustrations, and successes with me throughout the semester.

Despite the challenges presented by artificial intelligence chatbots, writing remains a critically important method for demonstrating learning in higher education. But it is only one method. The videos my students have been submitting since 2011–thousands of skits, cartoons, documentaries, military reenactments, original music videos, etc.–reveal that a brighter future lies ahead for online education when we are ready for it.  I suspect that future will concern itself much more with students’ expressions of genuine intelligence than it does with students’ use of artificial intelligence.