Designing Video Lessons for the Attention Economy
Students who face transportation challenges or busy work lives benefit from an asynchronous schedule, where online classes present new opportunities for educational growth. The ability to plug in anywhere, anytime makes it easy to fit a lesson into odd hours of the day. Before bed, during a jog, while washing the dishes—in an increasingly media-saturated landscape, a student’s temptation to consume a lesson passively as “content” can be an unexpected pitfall when it comes to online learning. Convenience can be a double-edged sword. You can’t know exactly how your students are engaging with curriculum. If you shared a physical space and the student was distracted by a sponge and dirty tupperware, you would ask them to leave the classroom! The internet is a space where your lessons share space with social media, cat videos, online shopping, and more. You have unwittingly become a competitor with all other media in what is known as the “attention economy”.
Rising Above the Noise
Before reshaping your lesson to compete with everything else on the internet, remember that students are participating in your class because they are (presumably) interested in the subject. There is so much media out there that is low-effort, and lacking vision and integrity. The producers of such media are known as “content farms” because the goal is to complete as many videos as possible (with as little planning as possible) to generate views and revenue. Often, these are made with unmonitored AI and contain errors or failure to organize information in a way that respects the viewer’s intelligence and time. Students notice when they are presented with such content. If your lessons share similar qualities, they will lose confidence in you as an educator if they feel you haven’t invested care into them. This is where attention is lost.
Refining the Structure
Your videos can be that refreshing exception if they resist the attitude of a content farm, and employ thoughtful, interesting ways of communicating information. If you include third-party media into a lesson, make sure it is from a trusted source and that you have selected a specific moment to make an example of. Take the time to proofread and read the scripts you plan on recording out loud. You’d be surprised how different it feels to speak and listen to your words rather than reading them. Think of your recordings as a private one-on-one instruction with the viewer. Use the same methodology you’d use on a lesson plan to organize the different chapters in your video. Avoid redundancies and try to keep videos short without sacrificing information.
Building a Persona
Developing an on-screen persona can be daunting, but it’s really about the energy you bring to the camera. Energy does not have to mean pretending you are someone you’re not and smiling all the time, but it does mean encouraging enthusiasm for the topic through body language and intonation. There is bouncy energy and quiet energy and a host of others in between, but what matters is you are focused and present.
Embrace the Medium
When you utilize UOES media production as a resource, we will handle your video production and editing. We can provide notes if requested and will make sure during your recording that you look and sound your best. Although we welcome ambitious and unconventional ideas for online learning, you do not need to reinvent the wheel. Students don’t necessarily want your video lessons to be entertaining in the conventional sense. They have other outlets for that. Your role is to create media that is well-researched, concise, and presented with confidence. These qualities come through in your final product, and students will be more likely to engage.