One of my projects for my Information Literacy Instruction course was to create a short tutorial video demonstrating how to use an online tool. The options were limitless, and of course, for that reason I chose to make mine knowledge management-related.

During my final year of my M.I., I served as the Communications Chair for our School’s student association, SIMSA. Alongside my regular duties, I also implemented a more structured and standardized transition planning process, which you can read more about in my portfolio.

The video I created demonstrates how to add and remove users from the student listserv — an essential skill for every Communications Chair to have. It will eventually serve as part of my transition materials for the incoming Chair.

If you’re interested in the creation process for this video, keep reading! Otherwise, check out the finished product here: SIMSA Listserv Tutorial

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Planning

The assignment criteria for this tutorial were broad. Our tutorial needed to:

• Introduce a user to a database or other online tool
• Be short – between 2-4 minutes
• Cover only one topic
• Contain both procedural (step-by-step) and conceptual (why?) content

In video time, 2 – 4 minutes goes a lot more quickly than you might expect. My initial idea was to introduce the incoming Chair to the listserv as a whole. Chairs need to know how to add and remove users, listserv owners, and permitted posters. Ultimately, this was too much material to meaningfully cover in the timeframe allotted and would have made for a complicated watching experience. I decided to narrow the topic to the most common listserv action: adding and removing users.

Design

When designing the tutorial video, I found the principles laid out by Bowles-Terry, Hensley, and Hinchliffe in their article Best practices for online video tutorials: A study of student preferences and understanding to be immensely useful. The study examines how students perceived the consumability, findability, and overall appeal of university library tutorial videos, and concludes with several concrete suggestions for making better instructional videos:

• Using a slower pace than one would in everyday speech
• Keeping videos short and task-focused; if possible, developing a table of contents that breaks longer videos into 30- or 60-second thematic chunks
• Using an “inverted pyramid” style of content structure, i.e., give the users the most important information before providing less vital, contextual content
• Keeping the design simple and professional
• Ensuring students have access to both textual and video tutorial content to accommodate learner preferences
• Making the tutorials easy to find at point-of-need

Some of the best practices I incorporated were speaking more slowly; giving task-based information first and saving contextual information for the end of the video; keeping the design simple; and providing both visual and textual information.

Creation

I really enjoyed the creation process and found it more involved than I had initially anticipated.

I decided to try making the video using free and/or open source means, which meant using a screen capturing software, recording the audio with my phone, and then compiling the files using OpenShot, which was recommended to me by a colleague, Dan Phillips, who’s incredibly passionate about open source software.

I found OpenShot to be fairly easy to learn – reminiscent of earlier video editing tools like Windows Media Player, back when that was still a thing. (Yes, it had been a while since I needed to make a video using desktop software!)

After finishing the video, I uploaded it to YouTube and tried out the automatic captions to see how well they would transcribe the content. Overall, they performed quite well, which I attribute in part to the slow pace of speech throughout the video. However, some specialised terms, like “SIMSA”, were not rendered appropriately, and so some manual edits were in order. Ultimately, I added my transcript and used the auto time-stamping feature to align the captions with the video. The result is not perfect, but it is accurate and includes several non-verbal auditory cues like [typing] that would otherwise have been missing.

What I’d do differently next time

In a perfect world this tutorial would incorporate another of Bowles-Terry et al.’s suggestions and have a table of contents that distinguishes between adding and removing subscribers. Ideally these could even be made separate videos to reduce the length of time needed to learn how to do these tasks. Within the constraints of the assignments it made sense to keep them as one video, but in recognition of a user’s desire to skip around, I added timestamps for both tasks to the video’s caption.

There is also a good deal of narration in the video. That’s because it is intended for someone brand new to the listserv, who might not know how to get to the right screen for adding and removing users. I also provide some “extra” content about how to format and search names/email addresses that isn’t strictly needed, but is intended to give the viewer a leg up in finding the easiest way to amend listserv membership.

While this sort of explanation is appropriate for a totally new user, the replay value of this video might be lower for someone who knows the basics and just needs a reminder on one part of the task. That’s where the text-based procedure steps come in.

Next time, I might try out a trial version of a proprietary software like Camtasia or Captivate too. I’m sure that some of my manual efforts would have been reduced by using a professional software, and it will be valuable experience for the future as well. If I were frequently making instructional videos I would also invest in a proper microphone. My phone performed well in this context, but reducing white noise and making clearer audio are key for workplace instructional videos.