Stephen C. Ehrmann, Senior Program Officer for Interactive Technologies, The Annenberg/CPB Projects
What genres of pre-produced, widely distributable video media can aid the professional development of educators? What do we know about producing and using each of these genres?
Those questions brought together a group of educators and producers with experience at all levels of formal education. We spent a day studying some of the best tapes and World Wide Webware we'd been able to find and trying to define the state of this new art. Lists of participants and products are attached.
We had a good day. Here's a personal summary.
The Annenberg/CPB Project has funded two projects--one headquartered at Gallaudet University and involving SRI International, and the other at California State University at Hayward--that are using video, the Internet and other media to help faculty around the country rethink their teaching of certain courses. None of us, however, had a very good language for even formulating the options for what the video media might look like. Each of us at this meeting had different reasons for being here; this was mine--to help these two projects (both of which were represented at the meeting) and our own Project think about current and emerging possibilities for using video and new media for faculty development. This inquiry reminds me of a past project ("Valuable Viable Software in Education: Case Studies and Analysis" ) that our Project co-sponsored with Educom. Then as now, we were faced with software that we didn't understand very well. We wanted to name and then analyze families of products that had proven both valuable (as evidenced by awards and evaluation) and viable (as evidenced by extensive, long term use). That previous study was successful in finding out some surprising and useful things about software used in education. I hope this series of meetings will be equally successful in sorting out possibilities for pre-produced video media in the professional development of educators.
By the end of the day, we had identified two major families of video packages.
Explanatory selling pieces were defined as products whose major purpose is to help the user imagine or visualize a specific new idea, technique or problem. Such products, when well done, must limit the number of ideas they try to "teach." Their aim is to help the user understand a particular idea or technique and, presumably, persuade the user to at least try it on for size. Many of these packages, it turns out, speak in a single narrative voice and perspective that is usually trying to show the central idea in as simple and positive a light as possible.
Some explanatory selling pieces can be designed to play a second role: persuading administrators, the public or other constituencies of the merits of supporting the innovation in question. We saw only one example of a dual purpose tape, which was used for staff development in cassette form and also broadcast on public television. It's clear that producing such a video is a difficult task, since the content and "voice" of the video might need to be different for those different audiences. In general it's important (for utility and for credibility) for such products to include concrete evidence and data, as opposed to more abstract claims alone. As we'll discuss below, the Internet's World Wide Web offers some interesting possibilities in that regard.
We talked a little about whether such tapes should exaggerate the phenomena they are describing to make them easier for novices to discern and, similarly, whether the videography and editing should seek to focus attention on the essentials of the idea while screening out large chunks of "reality" that might distract the focus of the user. Does this render the product seemingly more artificial and less credible?
On the production side, our discussion (of course) often turned to sound and the difficulty of capturing good sound in a classroom when the product is concerned with what various students are saying. One producer voiced some regret that she'd let limited production budgets influence her to film and include too little classroom footage in a video.
Provocative case studies display a situation, often a struggle, in a way that is intended to provoke inquiry and even controversy by implicitly or explicitly inviting the user to interpret what was going on. These are an example of what are sometimes called "trigger tapes." The case study may end, or pause, sparking the users to start thinking and talking about what they've seen and what they would suggest.
Although the producer often is thinking of a key issue that is at the heart of the controversy, different viewers may see, think about, and learn quite different things. So explanatory selling pieces are (in a sense) convergent, while provocative case studies are more divergent in the learning they each foster.
The three provocative case studies we watched stimulated a fascinating discussion about the affective side of such productions: how to create tension that draws in and informs the viewer, and how to create a bond between the user of the video and the people in the video. This also relates to establishing credibility. Matt Schneps of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics contributed many of the ideas in these paragraphs.
One way to create such tension is to show an important difference between what the teacher in the video thought was happening and what the viewer thinks (for example by showing the teacher teaching and then interviewing the students about what they have learned).
Or one can show a difference between what the teacher wanted to happen and, after the fact, what the teacher knows quite well actually did happen (falling short of her hopes). It's also important for the viewer to bond with the central figures.
Among the techniques mentioned were choosing sympathetic intelligent teachers in the first place, enabling the viewer to see inside the striving teacher's head through interviews, showing the teacher then making progress in dealing with a now-understood problem, using some close-ups rather than always using distant shots of the teacher, showing revealing emotional moments for the teacher, etc. In effect, one is documenting a journey, showing the faculty member encountering a problem, thinking about it and reacting to it. The Harvard- Smithsonian Science Case Studies (funded by the Annenberg/CPB Math and Science Projects) have an episodic structure, for example: 1) teacher is already trying to reform elements of his or her teaching, 2) consultation with an expert, 3) more struggle. There are elements of success and difficulty at each stage, and not necessarily any clear resolution. Progress toward reform is not oversimplified, but the user should be able to see movement. Matt argued that it was important not to show a pure success (such things can exist in videos if not in real life); viewers may see just surface features and assume that these were the golden road to success. Struggle, conflict and discomfort also help to engage the user, he argued.
The videographer plays a role in all this. Sometimes the camera constantly holds back, creating the potential to let the user make more choices about what to watch (and obscuring some detail), while in other cases the videographer is already beginning to tell a story by where close-ups are used and what is shown.
These products are often meant to be used in group discussion. Usually the user is meant to be drawn into advising the participants in the video about what they should do, or should have done. Case discussion are useful, because discussion participants bring to bear their own background, and each participant can learn by hearing how the other participants analyze and judge the events in the video. We'll return to the issue of use, below.
Any educational setting can be described (and evaluated) in two contrasting ways.
1. The "uniform impact" perspective assumes that the educator (producer) has a teaching objective that is the same for all users; the producer wants to impact how they think or see or feel. Explanatory selling pieces have such an objective and thus should be evaluated primarily in those terms--how well does the tape perform when used properly in fostering the kinds of reactions and learning for which it was produced? We have lots of evaluation textbooks that can advise on how to design such evaluations.
2. The same educational situation, however, can also be seen from a very different vantage point: a "unique uses" perspective assumes that the users each construe and use the educational opportunity offered them in different ways and with qualitatively different consequences. In a "unique uses" assessment, the evaluator is more interested in finding out if anything important happened (positive and negative) for each user than in prejudging what that outcome was supposed to have been. That's because a unique uses assessment is studying the divergent outcomes of the innovation. For example, we "evaluate" Shakespeare's works to be powerful educational material not because everyone learns the same thing from those plays and poems but because so many different sorts of people have learned unpredictably different and important things and so many teachers have been stimulated to their own forms of excellence.
The assessment of provocative case video materials must include "unique uses" methods. I'm currently writing about these techniques, but the basics aren't mysterious. Initially one has to study a sample of users as individuals, assessing outcomes for each and judging their import. Second, one seeks patterns in the user data--how useful and generative is this video compared with others? Are there certain patterns of outcomes that could be improved? Are there certain hazards that are encountered repeatedly when the video is used? And so on.
The exception was a World Wide Web demonstration from Mt. Holyoke. Each segment was about the teaching of a different faculty member. Most were introduced by short "talking head" clips of that faculty member, filmed with an inexpensive camera held by the Director of Academic Computing. The faculty member discussed some aspect of his or her teaching with technology. In some instances the Web then connected to some of the faculty member's materials for teaching an idea (texts, video images, animations) and there might also be an optional audio voice over.
The World Wide Web and CD-ROM introduce a new cut through the media. They make text (sometimes extensive) a key part of the product, do rather odd things to video [less resolution, less narrative to the video itself because it shorter, more accessible format than broadcast or cassette]. The Web also gives a whole new life to the venerable medium of slide-tape (video stills, audio, text, and short animation).
In the short term the Web seems particularly promising for organizing existing teaching materials, adding commentary and contexts. Webbed materials can also be stored and distributed on a CD-ROM.
Among the production issues we discussed:
In contrast, one product ("Race in the Classroom" from Harvard) was a series of role plays, staged by students and faculty who had personal experiences in the past but who were now reenacting that type of experience (racial issues in the classroom) in a contrived setting.
Our group usually preferred "authentic" but concluded that staging of role plays might be preferable when the issues are painful or hard to capture at affordable expense.
Sometimes the product speaks explicitly and implicitly in the voice of its subject: a teacher talking to teachers about his or her own experience, for example. That was true in the World Wide Web demo. It was true also in a reading video (that we didn't watch at our meeting) from the University of Illinois which spoke in the voice of the teacher it profiled; apparently she had worked closely with the producers in the development of this profile of her approach to teaching. Costs and Prices
A price of a bit over $1,000 per minute seemed most common for these tapes when made for distribution (and occasionally for broadcast), but one nice 8 minute tape (a provocative case made for research purposes) cost about $15/minute. Similarly the Web materials had not required any extra cash. Obviously these latter two examples cost the time of the participants.
We agreed that pricing involved considerable guesswork; there was much wider variation in price than in cost. Harvard's Bok Center's price of about $125 for a twenty minute tape seemed about in the middle, but prices ranged from zero (WWW) and $25 (a KQED tape) to several hundred dollars. Other, even higher prices were mentioned for videos that we didn't study at this meeting.
Another participant reported that a facilitator can deal with participants who say the tape isn't relevant for them by suggesting, "Imagine that the tape were relevant for you. If it were, what would be the point of relevance." That works surprisingly well.
For provocative case studies, it can be important to help participants in the discussion to zero in on a single choice that a person in the tape needs to make--you might ask users, "what choice could make the biggest difference in the way this episode unfolds?" Because the tape shows so much, it's useful for the facilitator to get participants to focus on how they would identify and make such a high leverage choice.
Matt also observed that what you see in a video like this depends in part on the screen you see it on. A wall-sized screen calls attention to body language, audio. The smaller intimate television screen makes subtle details more noticeable.
Both projects were intrigued by the provocative case study format and by the possibilities for using the Web. Since they (and the third project) make extensive use of text-based communication over networks, the Web offers an interesting new medium for presenting such case studies using a combination of media. Video can be used to present testimony and simply to give the observer a sense of what the physical set up and the students look like. For the Hayward project, where some teaching is done over a video network, it would be easy to digitize segments and include them in the product. Text is well-suited for presenting segments of course dialogue that originally took place by computer conference and email.
One could also imagine putting some such materials on a CD-ROM, and organizing them in the same way that Web materials are organized. Then Internet users could also employ the CD-ROM and Web material in an integrated way; from their poin