Educators everywhere are finding themselves in a scary new role: online television presenters. We offer remote individual and group coaching in this area, but here are some quick tips to get you started.
Media commentary by Steve Dunlop
Listen to podcast version here
The coronavirus pandemic is changing all of our lives in ways large and small. Restaurants and pub crawls are out - social distancing is in. Trips to the gym are dangerous. Long hikes in the woods or on the beach are becoming trendy. And teachers - in a myriad of ways, the custodians and transmitters of our civilization’s achievements - have suddenly found themselves thrust into a scary new role for which many are utterly unprepared.
A college professor friend of mine emailed me. “I have been under orders to instantly become an online teacher for the rest of the semester,” he told me. He included a cut-and-paste link to an online lecture on how to build an online lecture. Unfortunately, he said, it was sold out.
It’s time for us all to take a deep breath - as long as you’re standing 10 feet away from anyone else - and recognize something fundamental about having to move to online teaching in a pinch. It is simply this: that online lectures - at their essential core - are television.
Do not confuse the attributes with the essence - or the accidents with the substance, as Aristotle might say. An online lecture might include some Web-like interactivity. It might be watched in small snippets, instead of in hour-long chunks. And you will probably experience it on your iPad instead of in your living room. Delivery methods have changed and will change, but they have nothing to do with the core of the experience.
Online lectures, at bottom, are people, pictures, and ideas on a screen. They are television.
As a coach who has helped thousands of individuals communicate more effectively in the visual medium, let me offer four quick pointers on how to think of your new task as making television.
- Tell stories. "A growing body of cognitive research," wrote Chrystia Freeland in 2010 before she became Canada’s deputy prime minister, "is demonstrating something schoolteachers and entertainers have known for a long time: Most of us respond better to personal stories than to impersonal numbers and ideas." Television figured out a long time ago that the medium at its best when it tells stories. That means setting up your lectures with a strong narrative arc from beginning to end, and making use of short anecdotes to drive home your themes.
- Keep it short. It’s one thing for your student to sit in a lecture hall for an hour. It’s quite another for them to download your online lecture and see an hour-long timeline at the bottom of their screen. Make your material less intimidating and more engaging by breaking it up. Think micro-lectures of 4 to 6 minutes. You can probably double that length if your subject matter is especially compelling and you’re really telling stories.
- Loosen up. Too many online lecturers come across as dweebish and boring. That may be acceptable - barely - with a captive audience in a lecture hall. It is lethal for your prospects on television. Learn how to relate to the pinhole camera on your laptop, which is the principal conduit to your unseen audience. Imagine you’re sitting across the table from one of your smartest students. Look him or her in the eye. Get excited about what you’re conveying. And don’t be afraid to extemporize.
- Break out of the visual jail. Too many lecturers are lazy when it comes to the visual element. I’ve seen some, for instance, resort to handwritten notes captured by a virtual pen application. It's about as exciting as watching paint dry. Think creatively about visuals that could enhance your lecture - many of them are available at little or no cost in places like Wikimedia Commons. Ken Burns could make the Civil War come to life with creative use of tintypes, because he understood how to use them. You can too.
"This instrument," Edward R. Murrow said of television in 1958, "can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends." Your online lectures are television - there is no avoiding that truth. If educators are truly determined to make the world their classroom, they have to learn how to adapt to the medium - and not expect the medium to adapt to them.
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