One of the reasons I put together We Ignore Digital Media at OU Peril - the Movie earlier in the week is that it occurred to me that the original post was too long for a blog post really. Many people skim blogs for a quick info fix, but to go through the original post comprehensively would take about an hour if you watched the movies and followed all the links.
The movie is not much quicker to watch - but it is a different "user proposition": in this case, a (longish) video show...
It also occurred to me that we make HUGE assumptions about how our students spend time consuming our materials; if we have them for two hours at a time, or even for 1 hour, that would be a huge privilege. I have some reason to believe (;-) that some students on our online courses spend on average 15 minutes per visit to the course website (though I'm not sure how representative that simple average (mean, I think) is of the actual time spent on the site by actual individuals).
Many of our course materials are written with different size chunks in them - readings that take an hour, exercises that take half an hour, SAQs that take maybe 5 mins, maybe longer etc.
BUT there is no way a student can easily grab a bundle of 5 min chunks to consume while they're waiting at the bus stop, for example.
I think - if we're clever - we may be able to chunk content in such a way that is can be packaged as shorts - a five minute clip with a bit of supporting text to frame why we're using the clip/what we want students to try and get out of the clip/what we want them to think about while they are watching it - or bundling those shorts into a longer package that generates its own momentum and keeps you engaged for a longer study period.
That is, I feel there ought to be a way we can come up with a menu of learning items that can be "snacked on" throughout the day, or sat down to for a full all-in-one-sitting "meal".
(Retaining the food imagery, the 'Ever Wondered About Food?' OU/BBC programme works like that, I think. A half hour program on a single topic/theme, with individual packages that each last 5/6 mins(?) and can be shown as standalone shorts, if required? Just in passing, several episodes of Ever Wondered About Food? also happen to be available as MP3 downloads: ever wondered about food? "podcast" page. )
My formal training in media studies etc is zero - so this may all be so much nonsense. But then again, developing visual narrative skills internally, and via course offerings, is something I think we should be doing, so I'm happy to be self-experimenting on this... ;-)
Although something like the "peril movie" is NOT meant to demonstrate a potential vehicle for delivery (or assessment) in its current format - there is arguably too little critical analysis for that (although finding appropriate movies can be difficult at times) - it is partly intended to offer a start to ways in which we might explore how several multimedia clips from the web can be bundled into a chunk that lasts 10 mins, 20 mins, 30 mins, an hour etc. with textual inserts used to hint at a narrative structure.
I mailed some of the above comments around various people internally, as well as to the EATING group (ha! - food again...;-) and it turned up in response a few pointers to people who were already experimenting with such things.
It also turned up a couple of multimedia annotation tools that are being explored for potential use in the context of a particular online open content project...
Internal readers may also like to check out the video narrative explorer developed for the Understanding Media course, as well as the fOCUs video annotation tool developed for an observational psychology course (why is there no video demo of this available...?!)
For anyone wanting to explore the various tools that are out there for cobbling together video resources from public sources, here are a few more to get you started: