Crafting Technology-Enhanced Educational Videos for Visual Learners
Chen-Wei Wang · 2022
This paper discusses aspects of my teaching practice, how my students perceive it, and my reflections on it. The discussion is meant to allow cross-disciplinary educators to consider adopting or adapting from my approach. Students entering the CS or Software Engineering discipline have limited prior exposure to the taught subjects. What exacerbates their learning difficulty is the class size, restricting instructor’s intentional pauses and interactions. Furthermore, there is often a gap between the theoretical insights covered in lectures and the technical pre-requisites for completing the experiential laboratory assignments. My belief in inclusive teaching has led me to support student learning and engagement through an integrated use of: 1) a drawing tablet, replacing the conventional, in-class whiteboard and mirrored to the computer desktop, for illustrating concepts and examples; 2) choreography of computer desktop activities, e.g., slide presentation, illustrations on the drawing tablet and programming IDEs; and 3) recordings accessible outside the classroom for students’ self-paced learning and review. I have acquired my experience and expertise from recording 500+ lectures and 150+ hours of tutorials, where the unifying theme is the constant and frequent use of the drawing tablet for building illustrations, from scratch, of abstract concepts and/or complex examples. In all videos, the same level of clarity, quality of presentation, and proficiency of choreographing visual annotations is maintained. As a voluntary service to my community, I designed and have been running a course designed to share my teaching experience and reflections with fellow instructors across academic disciplines.