Writing Scripts to Make Your Course Videos More Engaging

“Good videos work for learning because they are good videos, not simply because they are videos.” — Elizabeth Chloe, Optimizing Video for Learning, 2017

As educational videos grow in popularity recreationally – especially with students – it makes more sense than ever to incorporate them into our classes. But video creation requires careful planning to ensure that it’ll meet our teaching objectives and effectively impact our students. While this might require more work than some forms of lecture preparation, a video can be reused verbatim across courses and semesters; if we put in the time and effort upfront, we can reap the rewards for years to come. 

In synchronous courses and research presentations, many instructors improvise, guided by bulleted notes and their well-remembered subject matter expertise; few will write out their talks word for word. For video lessons, however, Koby Leff would like to suggest that there are a lot of benefits to writing a precise script with a narrative structure (beginning, middle, and end), as we would for any movie.

I like to think of the overall process of making a video as requiring a set amount of labor, spread out across three stages: pre-production (writing and planning), production (recording), and post-production (editing). We can distribute the overall effort evenly across each stage, or we can load it disproportionately onto a particular stage. For example, many popular YouTubers improvise their videos, spending minimal time in pre-production, but they then have to spend double the amount of time editing, effectively constructing a script from their pre-recorded words. ¹

While not all instructors have editing skills (though I encourage you all to participate in upcoming IDEAS workshops to build them!), you all have profound expertise in your fields and practice sharing it with students. I therefore strongly suggest that you spend more time upfront scripting a video (i.e. writing about your expertise) so that you can spend minimal (if any) time in post-production.

This might sound daunting, but you can start small! 

As Flower Darby explains in Small Teaching Online, 2019, “Start with one mini-lecture video. Is there a concept that has always been hard to convey in your online class? There’s the subject of your first mini-lecture video. Next time you teach that class, add a couple more.”

Before sharing some tips for writing a strong script, let’s discuss when a great course video does not require a script.

When not to write a script

Students want authentic glimpses into their professor’s personality. This comes naturally in person, but can be hard to see in online courses. When we script, we can write jokes and try to work our personality into our performance, but recording ourselves improvisationally will always implicitly be authentic. While you start to add scripted videos to your online courses, I suggest you also pepper in some unscripted videos. These can take a lot less time to produce, but they are often less evergreen, so one method is not a replacement for the other.

As Forrest Bowlick – avid course video producer and Senior Lecturer of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences at UMass Amherst – explained in the recent IDEAS seminar about educational videos, there are two main types of non-scripted course videos: technical demonstrations and FAQs.

In a technical demonstration, you walk your student through a program or process, and the steps you have to demonstrate serve as your informal script. As Bowlick puts it, “I trust in my ability to go through a walkthrough naturally, and mistakes I make or issues that come up are essential to the learning experience.” For this reason, he will sometimes even intentionally make a mistake common to novices for the teachable moment of course correction. In how-to videos, showing students what not to do is just as important as showing them what to do – while as accidentally sharing an incorrect fact in a video explaining theory might come across as unpreparedness or lack of expertise. 

FAQ videos can be an even lower lift. When students submit the same question to you repeatedly, or if you receive a question that you think everyone should know the answer to, you can casually turn on your webcam or even grab your cell phone and informally answer. Especially if your course is reading heavy, students will likely appreciate the occasional video memo, and they’ll also love getting a chance to see your candid response as they would when asking a question you didn’t have time to prepare for in a synchronous course. ²

Those examples aside, virtually all other types of course videos benefit from a well-written script.

01 Intro Videos

A great place to start adding impactful video content in your courses is when introducing: the course as a whole, a new subject matter, or a unit. These should be short (2-7 minute) videos that set student expectations for what’s ahead, building excitement and inspiring them to get started on the work. Writing a script will help your intro videos stay short and punchy, both by giving you an opportunity to carefully organize the content and by eliminating time lost to mispeaking and stumbling over ideas – hiccups that feel completely natural in an hour long lecture but can make a two minute video drag.

When writing your intro video script (especially while outlining), make sure you implicitly answer what you expect will be students’ most common questions, since they won’t have a chance to raise their hand and ask them. Common examples include: 

• What prerequisite knowledge do I need?
• What are the course/unit expectations?
• What kinds of activities will we engage in?
• Why is this important to my life?

02 Lecture Videos

As I discussed in my presentation during the IDEAS seminar, we want our lecture videos to be much shorter than our in-person lectures. As Richard Mayer, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also explains in the seminar, this requires segmenting. Just as our lectures are already sub-divisions of our semester-long teaching objectives, we should divide the content of a full length lecture into bite sized, twenty minute max, sub-topics. 

When creating a roughly fifteen-minute lecture video, it might be unnecessary to script out every word verbatim. I do however suggest that you write a thorough outline so that the order you present information stays structured and precise, keeping your piece succinct and engaging, even if the exact language is improvisational.

I further recommend that you write out exact sentences to introduce transitions between two ideas in your video; it can be easy to riff on one piece of information, but often takes more preparation to connect two large ideas to each other. If you’re struggling to write an explicit transition between two ideas, this might be a good sign that you want to instead end your video at the transition point and give the second topic its own short video.

03 Explainer Videos

One of the affordances of video, as Elizabeth Chloe puts it, is that it can “transcend space and time to make concepts clearer or more interesting” (2017). With video, we can zoom out from a molecule to an organism; we can watch a sun rise and set in twenty seconds. Certain visual topics might actually be best explained with a video, even in your in person class.

This is the common format of most educational YouTube videos, and they require the most effort in terms of scripting. The downside of this video format is that it often needs animation or specialized filmmaking skills. Think about whether or not this type of video is something you have the capacity and expertise to produce – even if just filming on a cellphone. A potential workaround for animation is to screen record transitions in a PowerPoint presentation, but even that can be pretty advanced.

If you believe this type of video would be valuable to your teaching, keep an eye out for future offers from the IDEAS video team as we hope to expand our services to co-create such explainers with instructors in the future

04 Scripting best practices

1. Exclude unnecessary information

1. With every piece of information included, ask yourself if it truly needs to be in the video or if it can be expressed in a supplemental reading, blog post, or unscripted FAQ video as discussed earlier. There might even be a high-quality pre-existing video that can link to, to teach certain topics.; no need to reinvent the wheel.

2. Use plain, conversational language

1. Writing a video is different from writing a paper or a textbook. Replace jargon with broadly accessible words whenever possible. Try reading your script out loud to yourself as you write it to make sure it sounds as natural as possible in your voice.
2. Richard Mayer discusses the Personalization Principle in his seminar presentation, where he and his colleagues found that students connect much more with second person language than third person. For example, “your body” is a more impactful statement than “a body” or “the body.”

3. Structure your narrative

1. Videos are stories, and our audiences have come to expect a recognizable narrative structure in them. Use a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. Start with a “hook,” such as a question, to firmly draw in students’ attention. Conclude by answering the question. Every element of your video should serve a central thesis: introduce it, provide the framework necessary to summarize it, then summarize it. If there is an element of your video that doesn’t serve that overarching topic or the answer to your question, then it belongs in a different video.
2. Check out my presentation on narrative structures for lecture videos in the IDEAS seminar for more information.

4. Use a shot-list

1. If you will be incorporating visual content into your video such as slides or images, you can use a shot-list ³, a grid with one column for audio (what you’ll say) and one column for visuals (what your audience will see). I suggest you start by writing a prose-only version of your script, then chop it up into a shot-list once you feel good about it; it can be tricky to change your word choice once it’s divided across a table.

Whether through writing articles, grant proposals, or syllabi, I imagine that everyone reading this article is well experienced at turning their expertise into linearly structured prose. I encourage you to leverage those same skills to make highly compelling, entertaining, and informative course videos.

Keep an eye out for future IDEAS video writing workshops! They are filling up fast this semester, but we will offer more in the fall.

Notes & citations

1. Many documentarians actually transcribe their interview footage and then edit the transcript in a Word document in a process called “paper-cutting.” In this sense, documentaries still have scripts, they are just written after instead of before filming.
2. You can also record short update videos when you change a due date or assignment to similarly make a personal connection to your virtual students. (Darby, 2019)
3. To use the above shot-list, create a copy of the document.