Investigating the feasibility of co-production of digital media with students

The Learning Development (LD) team has a suite of online videos which aim to provide students with support and guidance in a range of academic skills. The usage statistics show that they are more widely used than other content such as PDF documents or visual guides. An audit of these videos revealed that most were written by or featured academic and professional staff, were of poor technical quality, and were ‘talking heads’ which, rather than encourage active learning, may result in passive engagement and therefore shallow rather than deep learning (Ryan, 2013). An opportunity was identified to remake videos in collaboration with students to address these issues and to increase student participation and representation in learning development content. Two LD tutors and a media and journalism lecturer collaborated on a project to co-produce academic skills videos with students. Students were given a brief to create videos based on their own experience of study skills. They also took part in focus groups and completed a survey to find out more about their perception of educational videos and the experience of creating their own. There were two main aims in undertaking the project: the creation of original content by students that addressed some of the concerns we had about the efficacy of existing videos, and the development of a model of co-production which could be used as a framework to produce future content in collaboration with students