Designing MOOCs videos - A prompt for teachers and advisers' pedagogical development?

The use of online video is not new in education but it undergoes a new momentum. What is new is not the medium but its scale of deployment and availability (Van Gog, 2013). MOOCs have played their part in this rise since these new modes of online learning deliver learning through a series of (short) videos. Both for teachers and Teaching & Learning Centers, like IFRES at the University of Liège, designing, shooting, editing, ornamenting, and locating such videos in the instructional design of a MOOC is a challenge. This presentation documents how this challenge was experienced on both sides. As for staff trainers, MOOCs imply the implementation of a particular technical infrastructure and pedagogical engineering. At the University of Liège, it also demanded to grapple with a corpus of new concerns such as: - Appropriate lengths of instructional videos (Guo, Kim, Rubin, 2014); - Cognitive load theory applied to multimedia components (Cooper, 1990; Barrett, 2006; Sweller, 2011) - Quality principles in instructional multimedia (Mayer, 2005) - Pedagogic strategies for the use of video (Zhang 2006; Hibbert; 2014, Thomson, Bridgstock, & Willems, 2014) - Inventories of videos styles in order to go beyond the seamless shot of teachers in front of blackboards or slideshows (Hansch, Newman, Hiller, Schildauer, Mc Conachie, & Schmidt, 2015; Van de Poël, Martin, & Verpoorten, 2015) Afterwards, an extra effort had to be made to convert these resources into a series of conceptual tools (storyboard framework, grid of qualitative criteria, etc.) usable by average teachers to their writing of the video sequences. The presentation will describe these processes intended to a) securing the video production of three MOOCs in a tight timeframe (institutional requirement) and b) fostering the pedagogical development of the involved teachers (“raison d’être” of a Teaching & Learning Center). As for teachers, the presentation will provide a report of the difficulties and surprises teachers came across when designing efficient videos. Some of these cognitive discrepancies suggest that the making of instructional videos calls for a different set of skills than those required for classroom teaching. Sometimes MOOCs instructors wrongly believed that they could translate their offline teaching experience to an online environment without much preparation and pedagogical novelty (Hansh & al., 2015). Lessons learnt show that it is critical for the writing process of the first video sequences to be an object of great care by the faculty support team. During this process, it is important that each comment, suggestion or decision be systematically explained to the teachers in order to create new beacons and tenets. A questionnaire survey of 10 participant teachers, coupled with 3 in-depth interviews conducted according to an appreciative mode of inquiry (Cockell & McArthur-Blair, 2012) will be administered. Protocol analyses will be applied on the interviews data in order to ascertain to what extent the making of MOOCs videos conveyed opportunities for pedagogical development. The presentation will report on the results