Live Streaming and Student Learning
/by Jeff Anderson
Hello and Welcome. This is a companion blog post to my How to Live Stream blog page.
In this article, I introduce the ways in which I use YouTube’s Live Stream tools to support student learning in my classes. My goal is to introduce some of the ways I think about live streaming, and video content creation more generally, as tools to support student learning in my classes. I do not believe that simply by using videos, my classes get better. While video content is very powerful, I have found the process of integrating this content in the classroom to be quite challenging. In this post, I address some of my attitudes toward using videos to help students learn. I hope that by starting this discussion, my readers will begin to begin develop their own attitudes and ideas about how this technology might best serve your students.
What is Live Stream?
A live stream is a “technology used to deliver content in real-time (as it happens) to computers and mobile devices over the internet by transmitting audio and video as a continuous flow.” In other words, this is a synchronous broadcast of a specific event over the internet.
Why is live streaming not my favorite tool?
Before I start selling this idea, I should say that I actually prefer NOT to live stream content in my classes. I find live stream lecture content to be of much lower production quality than other forms of videos.
Instead, I yearn to be able to create videos at home. When I do this, I film raw content via a collection of different media. Then I use the video editing software Camtasia to produce succinct, structured, well-rehearsed videos that deliver content in short segments. I then upload these videos onto YouTube so that students can watch any content from our course at any time they would like (assuming they have access to a computer with internet access). Below is an example of the type of video that I prefer to create for my students.
How does the 24 hour day crushes my dreams to create high-quality video?
It is my dream to be able to create a sequence of videos that cover every topic in a course before walking into my first day of class with my students. However, assuming our society does not drastically change the way we fund education, the cruel reality is that there are not enough hours in a day to be able to accomplish this goal.
Let me explain.
The video you see posted above lasts 5 minutes and 38 seconds. That video is embedded in a playlist, titled “Intermediate Algebra, Lesson 3: Introduction to Factoring” that includes a total 16 videos. Those 16 videos last 1 hour, 31 minutes, 26 seconds. This playlist is designed to help deliver content for 1 lesson in a class that includes 18 lessons.
This is where the math gets scary. For one minute of filmed content, I spend a minimum of 8 minutes of production time to get that content into the form you see above. For the “Introduction to Factoring” playlist mentioned above, this type of video production cost me at least 12 hours of my life.
Of course, that is simply for producing these videos. That cost does not include the time I spent researching the content, creating in-class worksheets, writing in-class assessments associated with this content, and developing classroom management systems that help students learn to use these videos to enhance their learning.
If we take all that time into account, I might posit that for one hour of filmed content I need about 30 hours of preparation time to authentically leverage this content to enhance student learning for all students in my class. And that is just the upfront cost. After that initial investment, I will probably need extra time curating and iterating my resources as I develop my course.
Why is this worth it?
There is something very special about a learning experience in which the teacher of the class create high-quality, custom content specifically designed for her students and gives this content away for free so that all students can access this at any time in their life. This work helps to eliminate barriers to student learning and sends a very clear message to students that they are the center of that teacher’s professional universe. Moreover, once I create a set of videos, that content is mine to use in my classes forever.
Let me be quite clear when I say: my students are worth every minute of time I spend producing videos. In fact, in my teaching practice, I make it a priority to develop the habit of making videos. My commitment to this endeavor arises out of my deep respect for my students and my desire to create work that I believe represents my best effort.
How do I use live streaming in my classes?
While I much prefer to produce high-quality video content, the reality of the situation is that I cannot easily do this. I usually do not start producing videos like the one seen above until I have spent somewhere between 300 - 400 hours working on a course.
This implies that for the first few years I teach a course, I force my students to feel pain and suffering caused by my lectures. Ouch!
Over the years I have been teaching, I have been very lucky to serve hundreds of students. As part of my teaching practice, I make a habit of administering quality control surveys in every one of my classes. I have four different versions of these surveys that I administer throughout the quarter as part of my test correction and course evaluation processes. On each of these surveys I ask students to give me feedback on what they like about my courses and what they think I can do to improve.
One of the central themes I have noticed over 7 years of implementing this practice is that students appreciate any effort I make to help the get access to lecture content outside of class. Partially this is because students are human and are not always able to be in class every day. When they miss part of a lecture-based class, that absence can have a huge effect on their learning, especially if I don’t give them access to auxiliary resources to help them catch up. I also know that many students struggle to follow long, technically challenging presentations.
By live streaming my lecture content, I address these concerns.
For example, in winter quarter 2020, I started live streamed every single lecture in my Engineering 11: Introduction to MATLAB course. Below is an example of a live streaming session I captured on Wednesday 2/5/2020.
I start this live stream at the beginning of each lecture period and end as soon as I am done talking for the day. One of the really powerful features of my set up is that the entire experience is controlled by the click of a single button. Once I set up my OBS Studio software correctly, I push the “Start Streaming” button to begin and the “Stop Streaming” button to end.
When I do so, my entire lecture is automatically available on YouTube in real-time. Students can pause the live stream, rewind the video, and post questions and comments on YouTube. Moreover, as soon as I am finished, the entire video remains on YouTube for any of my viewers to watch at any time.
Here are some of the amazing circumstances that have occurred this quarter while I have been live streaming:
I had students who could not come to campus due to transportation issues but followed along at home in real-time. Those students posed questions to me on the YouTube comments section and followed along synchronously even though we were miles apart.
I had students get sick and be unable to participate in lecture synchronously because they were either in the hospital or in bed resting. But, those students reported that because lectures were automatically available on my YouTube, they could access the lecture material online as soon as they recovered and catch up much more quickly than in their other classes.
I had one student who had DRC accommodations having to do with how he processed information. He struggled very hard in all of his classes to stay on track in lecture despite his high intelligence and earnest efforts. Working as a team, this student and I developed a customized learning strategy in which he would watch lectures in a different room synchronously. But, every time he got stuck, he would pause or rewind the video and spend a few minutes trying to work through the challenge. If he could not do so, he would write a question down and move on. At the end of each lecture, the student would come into the room and ask me his questions, one-by-one. Inevitably, he would only finish about 40% - 50% of that days content. No worries! After our conversation and a quick break, the student would visit my YouTube page, watch the rest of the video for that days lecture, write down his questions. We then made weekly office hour appointments to get those questions answered and check in about his learning needs. None of this would have been an option if I approached this class using my traditional methods
The amazing thing is that I am still very young in learning how to use this technology. I can imagine many creative ways to leverage this tool beyond what I am currently doing. But, for a relatively low cost, I am utterly amazed by the benefits that students get from this work. And, I have been pleasantly surprised by the fact that it seems like my entire class is passing. Part of this is due to some of the grading structures that I create in my classes. But, I also believe that by live streaming, I have eliminated some very real barriers to learning for my students!
The 400 Gorilla in the room: Lectures and why I detest them?
In this blog post, I tackle the topic of using videos to support student learning. Whenever I have this conversation with educators who have not spent a ton of time thinking about how to use videos in the classroom, one of the first questions that comes up is “videos seem like a lot of work. Why don’t you just lecture?”
My response is always the same: lectures are notoriously bad at creating active learning environments for most students. Lecturing is to 21st century learning what bloodletting is to 21st century medicine: it is a technology of a bygone era that, if used frequently, can actually cause great harm to most recipients. In fact, there is a mountain of literature in cognitive and learning science that discusses much better approaches to learning than lectures.
Lectures place students in a passive (rather than an active) role. Lecturers spend the majority of class time talking at students, encouraging one-way communication. This suggests the unspoken belief that teachers are the source of knowledge and that learning happens when the teacher is talking. This is not at all how learning works.
In reality, learning occurs when students struggle to understand material and repeatedly test themselves on their comprehension of new ideas. Such struggle and assessment seldom happens when a teacher is talking.
In the development of my career, I definitely concede that lectures are a necessary evil in the early stages of developing a class. I wish, so badly, that the state of California spent as much money on R&D at teaching institutions as it does for R&D at R1 research institutions. For example, I’d love it if the state of California funded community colleges with enough money so that I could teach one class per quarter with a maximum of 10 students in that class including 2 embedded student employees who act as tutors and graders. The state could also spend enough money to fund teachers for 12 months of preparation work each time we launch a new class.
Until that happens, there is no way I can create a learning environment that provides everything students might need in the early phases of teaching a class. Thus, I lecture out of necessity and I hate every minute of that.
Finally, I recognize that the model I am proposing above may not be useful for teachers who are later in their careers. The amount of time and energy required to learn these technologies and figure out how to change teaching practices using these tools is very high.
Moreover, this option is relatively new. YouTube was created in 2005 and the first iPhone came out in 2007. These platforms and technologies fundamentally changed the way we distribute and receive video content in our society. Many teachers who started their careers in the decades before these landmark developments did not have access to these options and have spent hundreds of hours developing resources without these tools in mind. To require these dedicated professionals to make this change without support and funded development time, I believe, is not quite fair to the great work they’ve done to usher in the next generation.
But, with that said, I refuse to believe that lectures are the best that I can do! On the contrary, I will not be surprised if in 50 years from now, the practice of lecturing is obsolete in most undergraduate classes and has been replaced by video. As a teacher in the early stages of my career, the sooner I learn to use video in my classes, the better. That leaves only the question: do I use other peoples work of learn to do this form myself. In my view, content that I create for my students is much more valuable to the learning environments I want to create than content made by other people. Live streaming is just one tool in the larger arsenal of tricks I use to make videos for my students.