Educational Videos to Inspire Your Creations - Part 2

Answer in Progress takes a different approach than the standard “I’m an expert delivering you my completed research”. They begin filming during their research process and bring the viewer along on their journey of discovery. Whether it’s true documentary style or a carefully scripted illusion, they effectively make the viewer feel like the information is accessible and credibly sourced while creating that sense of mystery and suspense that keeps us hooked. The traditional video essay/monologue doesn’t begin until 3:30, by which point the viewer is already invested in an entertaining narrative and almost unaware they’re learning.

Stylistic Takeaways

• Screen capture: We see screen recordings of the presenters’ search queries, allowing us to follow along with their material work. We can use this technique to show our students how they can acquire new knowledge outside of the video by demonstrating how to use a program or search a database.
• “Vlogging”: Video-blogs (“vlogs”), a staple of social media, are far less formal than typical video essays; people talk unscripted to a camera and share observations, often on the street or at home without a professional lighting setup. Answer in Progress intersperses these casual clips to add a sense of spontaneity and discovery. For instructors, this approach can significantly lower production barriers; as discussed in our article on script writing, a casual video from your phone on your couch can be a great way to tell students about a new assignment or answer an FAQ without the need for editing, scripting, and fancy setups. We can also use them when we have a correction or addition to add into an already filmed video or, as with this video, to update our students on our research progress, perhaps filming new results from a lab.
• Montage and interactive environments: This video uses quick cut montages and on-the-street footage to establish scale and visual variety—far beyond what we’ll have the resources to do in our course videos. Still, scaled-down versions of this technique are highly transferable (e.g., a botany professor filming a walk through a greenhouse while identifying specimens).
• Intentional DIY: One section of the video has the slides projected onto the presenter, creating an inviting DIY feel and, along with her tone, a comforting silliness. When videos appear unpolished our students may start to tune out, but when that lack of polish is visibility intentional it can have the reverse effect, making us more relatable.

Maggie Mae Fish is a film and culture critic more than an educational video essayist, but we can learn a lot from the understated, story-centered techniques she uses to argue her original thesis in this video. 

Stylistic Takeaways

• Media collage: Fair use laws allow Maggie Mae Fish to show footage of the commercials she’s critiquing along with other pieces of media to demonstrate her point rather than merely summarizing her sources. “Show, don’t tell” can be particularly powerful when a pre-existing video can illustrate our point.
• Full-screen quotes: She puts important quotes in full screen text and narrates them entertainingly, as well as talks through complex charts and graphs, making dense primary sources engaging and impactful.
• Silliness: While the content of the video is quite serious (and pretty dark), Fish uses silly characters, personal anecdotes, and, at times, over-the-top exasperated deliveries to bring the whole piece into an intimate conversational realm as opposed to the cold, numerical, society level story it could be telling.
• Academic story structure: This video masterfully mirrors traditional scholarly papers in that it starts by introducing all of the relevant background information and pre-existing studies before combining and building on them to argue the unique thesis.

If you liked this, her long two-parter on Joseph Campbell was a big paradigm shift for me (especially since I am often thinking about the shapes of stories).

With the lowest and simplest production value on this list, Dime Store Adventures proves that you don’t need a budget to create gripping videos—though you might need a lot of time digging through archives and hiking through the woods. The creator usually focuses on little known New England history. Some of his videos involve him in a more traditional style monologuing to the camera with picture-in-picture images (though his single long takes blow my mind… did he memorize all this, or are there cue cards in the woods?).

Stylistic Takeaways

• Self-shot B-roll: This video combines to-camera monologues with low quality B-roll the presenter shot himself of the places he’s talking about, using physical demonstrations as some of his primary sources—we’re learning from the rocks themselves.
• Personalization principle: As professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara Richard Mayer observes in his Personalization Principle, audiences are more engaged when they feel like they are being spoken to directly, as we see with this presenter’s extensive use of second person pronouns. Like in many of the past examples, his tone is casual and his passion audible, which is the most important ingredient in bringing facts to life.
• Commentary on sources: The presenter not only provides archival sources on screen, but also comments on where he found them and their fidelity. This will help your students trust your claims, as well as teach them the critical eye they should approach their own fact collection with.
• Clear narrative arc: The story structure is textbook: from question to background info to consequences of said info, all in service of answering the opening question.
• Humor: As with many of the examples above, this video is funny—going as far as to break the fourth wall and highlight mistakes rather than attempting to hide them with the magic of editing.

Also… wow, what a yarn! Pour one out for Gieusseppe Cavicchio who rescued Massachusetts from technocracy 100 years ago.