Case Study: Creating Multimedia Lessons (Flipping your Face-to-Face Course)

Associate Professor Marie-Claude Couture, MS, PhD worked with USF’s Instructional Design Team during Summer, 2016 to transform her face-to-face masters course, Epidemiology, into online and hybrid versions for USF’s Master of Public Health program.

Multimedia lectures were produced in the development of the course for these formats. The digital lectures not only provided content for the online and hybrid classes, but enabled Dr. Couture to deploy some sessions of her face-to-face class as “flipped”.

“Before creating multimedia lectures for an online version of a class, be sure that you have taught it through a couple of semesters, so that you will have a stronger script.” Dr. Couture

The multimedia lectures (see example in link below) were developed based on Dr. Couture’s in-class live lectures. Dr. Couture spent a lot of time organizing the material, refining and scripting, as well as recording audio in the studio. It was important to make sure the lectures were comprehensive, as they covered foundational material for the course. The writing process was intensive, “spending this much time, forces you to make them better,” she says of the lectures.

Dr. Couture recommends that you, “keep your lecture videos short” and believes that experience in teaching a course is critical to generating accurate and effective multimedia lectures. This way, she says, “you won’t need to revise your lectures, which is challenging, once recorded”. But, one could always add short new topic video, audio, or text updates for information that changes.

USF’s Instructional Design team offers the following tips to make digital lectures more engaging:

  • Ask your audience engaging questions, as you might in a live lecture (Using Effective Questions, 2017)
  • Provide rich examples and metaphors (Suthakaran, Filsinger, & White, 2013)
  • Avoid simply reading slides - it is redundant and difficult to read while listening (Kalyuga & Sweller)
  • Use relevant images to support your content. (Mayer, 2014)
  • Provide alternate formats of the lectures when possible. (i.e.: offer audio files and powerpoint slides as separate files) This way, a student can download the audio file and listen to it on a mobile device and then reference the slides when they are back at their desktop. (Principle 1)
  • Curate course media into short, logical segments (Mayer, 2014)
  • Use storytelling to increase likelihood for long-term recall (Woodhouse, 2011)
  • Provide transcripts whenever possible (Rose and Gravel, 2011)

After producing the lectures for online viewing, Dr. Couture realized that they could be used in the face-to-face version of her class as well (Multimedia Lectures in MPH). The core fundamentals detailed in her lectures were the same, so she “flipped” her face-to-face class, asking students to view the multimedia version of some of her lectures prior to coming to class. This freed up her class time to support active learning and made her more available in class for students who sought to ask questions and better understand the material.

In her online course evaluations, Dr. Couture’s students provided positive responses to the lecture videos and indicated that they were helpful. Students appreciated the flexibility to listen and return to the lectures as needed (Multimedia Lectures in MPH).

Dr. Couture collaborated with the Instructional Design Team to produce the lectures. While she developed the content and the original slides, she consulted with the ID Team’s Senior Instructional Designer, Xavier Gomez and Multimedia Contractor, Michelle Ruiz, to create the lectures. The audio was recorded, then edited with the slides using Adobe Captivate by the multimedia developers on the ID team. Captivate allowed the inclusion of an interactive table of contents, enabling students to navigate to different topics easily and clearly presenting the information within. While this level of production is not realistic for many faculty working independently, there are many effective ways to produce multimedia lectures.

Here are some guides that might be useful in creating multimedia lectures.

Converting PowerPoint to Video

Panopto Lecture Capture and Video Management

Link to Epidemiology multimedia lecture

This case study was written by Mishiara Baker with research support from Mickey Smith and editing support from the ID team.

Works Cited

Kalyuga, S., & Sweller, J. (2014). The Redundancy Principle in Multimedia Learning. In The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning(2nd ed., pp. 247-262). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Mayer, R. E. (2014). Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning. In The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning(2nd ed., pp. 43-71). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Mayer, R. E. (2014). Principles for Managing Essential Processing in Multimedia Learning: Segmenting, Pre-training, and Modality Principles. In The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning(2nd ed., pp. 43-71). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Rose, D. H., Ed. D., & Gravel, J., M. Ed. (2014, March 7). About UDL. Retrieved December 18, 2014, from http://www.udlcenter.org/aboutudl/udlguidelines/principle1#principle1_g1..., V., Filsinger, K., & White, B. (2013). Using Analogies as an Experiential Learning Technique in Multicultural Education. Multicultural Perspectives,15(2), 92-97. doi:10.1080/15210960.2013.781368

Using Effective Questions. (n.d.). Retrieved December 18, 2017, from https://teaching.cornell.edu/teaching-resources/engaging-students/using-effective-questions#why

Principle I. Provide Multiple Means of Representation. (n.d.). Retrieved December 18, 2017, from http://www.udlcenter.org/aboutudl/udlguidelines/principle1#principle1_g1

Multimedia Lectures in MPH with Marie-Claude Couture [Personal interview]. (2017, October 4).