Leveraging Recorded Mini-Lectures to Increase Student Learning

Creating useful and usable digital lecture materials for blended and online courses is challenging. Recording an instructor lecturing to a classroom can be difficult, and most students are not interested in watching a 50- to 90-minute recording of a lecture. And because students might not watch them, recorded classroom lectures may do little to increase student learning. Rather than recording traditional classroom lectures, some instructors at the University of Wisconsin–Stout record mini-lectures using the multimedia program Camtasia. These videos may provide students with traditional lecture information but also offer many important advantages. They are easy for students to review and can be viewed on demand and replayed multiple times.