Educational Videos to Inspire Your Creations - Part 1

Course videos can serve a number of objectives, from welcoming students to our classes, instructing them on how to use a program or conduct an experiment, to teaching them lecture content, and so on. Different purposes require different forms of videos, as discussed in my article on planning and scripting educational videos. The stylistic takeaways from each of the videos presented below can be used regardless of the type of video you’re creating. Think of this list, as requested by many UMass faculty who are dipping their toes into video production, as a menu of rhetorical possibilities you can use to make your videos engaging and help your students better process and retain your lessons. Let the videos below inspire you to develop a creative style, just as you would in the classroom. 

With each of these examples, the content—the actual educational lesson—sticks in my mind more than the video techniques used to teach it. However, without very intentional video choices, even the most fascinating concepts might go over our heads, feel too elementary to be interesting, or simply not stand out in the flood of information our modern world bombards us with. Of course, none of that matters if we don’t refine our lessons. We must make sure we have something important to say that connects to our students’ lives and overarching course objectives and ensure our evidence convincingly argues for or demonstrates our thesis.

Part 1: Traditional Educational Videos

This first chapter showcases videos that are probably the closest stylistically to what we might actually produce for our classes. They feature a single speaker talking to the camera, accompanied by light visuals or slides, presenting existing research on a subject—not dissimilar to how a standard class lecture functions.

PBS Eons — The Arms Race That Made Insects Take Flight — 10:29 — 2025

PBS Television has been laying the groundwork for today’s educational videos for half a century, so it’s no surprise that their YouTube channels are masterclasses in simple but effective, bite-sized teaching. PBS Eons explores a wide range of topics about prehistoric life and geology and how those forces shaped our modern world.

Stylistic Takeaways

• Effective “b-roll”: B-roll is supplemental footage that maintains viewer attention by adding visual variety (in contrast to footage of the presenter, i.e. “a-roll”). The b-roll here is simple—usually static images, sometimes with mild annotations—but relevant, even when it’s not adding new information. Notice how they repeatedly switch between b-roll and a-roll before the viewer has an opportunity to get bored.
• “Picture-in-picture”: Sometimes we see the presenter standing next to their slides or b-roll, both pictures visible simultaneously (a technique most prominent today in “late night” talk shows). This is a great way to add visual information to keep your students engaged and can save you a lot of time in editing: if we screen record our slide deck and click through it while recording ourselves, we can simply overlay the two time-synched video files and save time deciding when to switch back and forth.
• Content > form: The video’s understated filmmaking style fades into the background as the fascinating information takes center stage, greatly aided by the simple language and joyful passion of the presenter.
• Captivating opening: The opening, or “hook,” employs a popular misconception to show viewers that they have much more to learn about this subject than they might have thought, pulling them into a short lecture as if it were a mystery. While our students might be required to watch our videos for a grade, a little suspense can make them feel compelled to do so regardless.

Otherwords — Where Did Cringey Corporate Jargon Come From? — 6:07 — 2025 

Another stellar PBS offering, Otherwords, gives short linguistic lessons taught by a PhD sociolinguist, answering bizarre questions about our use of language that we take for granted. 

Stylistic Takeaways

• Supporting case studies and examples: The old storytelling adage to “show, don’t tell” can help students internalize lessons beyond rote memorization. The frequent examples/case studies here meaningfully substantiate the thesis to the audience; we don’t have to believe them on expertise alone, but find ourselves grinning as they convincingly demonstrate—nearly prove—etymologies we’d never considered.
• Humor: As we’ll see in many of these videos, a little humor goes a long way in keeping dense information digestible.
• Keywords and definitions: When introducing a crucial term, we see it—sometimes accompanied by its definition—written on screen, picture-in-picture next to the presenter. This approach harnesses dual coding, the cognitive benefits of combining verbal and visual information. The video’s animations further reinforce key terms, keeping attention focused on the most salient ideas.
• Story structure: This video is a perfect example of the hook-context-developement-climax story structure we teach in our IDEAS script writing workshops for UMass instructors: we start with a question; then learn some concrete, grounded information; then zoom out big-picture to the implications of the building blocks of info we’ve been given. 

Vsauce — Did the Past Really Happen? — 11:56 — 2015

There’s no consensus on which creator laid the groundwork for today’s video essay format, but, for me, Vsauce is the essential trailblazer. I would not be an educational communicator had I never discovered it. Its earlier videos, including this one, answer simple, multidisciplinary questions in complex ways. They combine—or “interleave”—knowledge from different domains, a practice shown to improve learning.

This video’s loose, stream-of-consciousness structure is engaging, but it does not emphasize a single thesis as strongly as we typically aim to in formal instruction. I would caution against straying quite this far from a defined learning objective. Vsauce’s more recent videos are even less linear, but for those drawn to this style, they offer profound, almost psychedelic, explorations unlike anything else online.

Stylistic Takeaways

• Bolded keywords: Vsauce uses bolded keywords alone to focus attention on a single academic term, allowing the presenter to explain its meaning and relevance without the viewer being able to skim ahead. The context and complexity of your term should dictate whether or not you visually include the definition—a skill I assume everyone reading this already intuitively understands while crafting slide presentations.
• Visual variety: While we mostly see the presenter, subtle shifts to b-roll and simple animations keep the pacing brisk and dynamic.
• Personal narrative: The presenter illuminates some personal context to create an emotional draw and remind us that a fellow human cares about this information on the other side of a screen, causing us to empathetically mirror his interest. We’ll see much more about personal narratives in part two of this article series.

Final Takeaway

As you develop your scripts, shotlists, and/or slidedecks for your next course videos, see if you can find spots to incorporate some of the above techniques. It might be daunting at first to figure out how to work these gimmicks into your lessons, but, after a little bit of practice, I suspect you will find that structuring your videos around tried and true narrative practices and moments of visual emphasis can help accelerate your planning and writing process, giving you the bones that you can flesh out with the meat of your lesson.

Stay tuned for Part 2: Personal Narratives.