Industry best practice and industry good practice are also dependent on ease of access for upload and linking. If you look at the LinkedIn Learning videos, they sequence from one short video to the next, in a series of bookmarks and chapter. Unless you have a good media server, that will take extra effort to create separate chapters, and a large number of short videos is often harder to navigate than one longer video that can be scrolled ore has chapter timestamps.
Video Content Options:
Picture in Picture
Picture in Picture, or Picture overlay, is a common method where you set aside a portion of the screen real estate to have a live camera feed on you. This approach is particularly popular in the Twitch and YouTube video game streamers. There’s a small amount of design set up to consider, mostly around ensuring your Powerpoint slides don’t have important information blocked by your in-screen presence.
For those unfamiliar with the Picture in Picture Recordings, this can be captured in Camtasia and in the more recent versions of PowerPoint. Picture in picture (PiP) voice over presentations are useful for reconnecting the students with you as a presenter, and as a performer. I recommend having some parts of the course pre-record content use the PiP approach in videos about the assessment, the onboarding and the expectations.
Zoom does it relatively badly when compared to an intentional system such as Powerpoint or Camtasia, however it still does remind students that we exist as participants in their education.
If you have limited opportunity to record Picture in Picture videos, prioritise the onboarding videos for PiP to provide a human face to the course, to increase cohort cohesiveness. The PiP process does require a level of post-production to be most effective, and needs to be workload factored in the course design.
Full Screen Presenter
This approach borrows more from the TV newspresenters, and our Zoom conference calls. Usually seated at a desk, with a webcam framing the clean bits of our office or room behind us, this is the eyes-front monologue to the screen.
In this mode, I prefer to use the Open Broadcast Software (OBS) streaming software, as it affords me some additional customisations. In this instance, as part of the thematic presence for the course, I was using different overlays based around the idea of this being a live camera / raw camera stream, and less professional / more personal than the pre-recorded slides. That it took more set up that just hitting F8 in Camtasia and F5 in powerpoint was immaterial. It looked raw, and ‘behind the scenes’ and suited the Week Ahead briefing videos.
Full Screen Presentation
On the other side of the full screen equation is the familiar Voice-over-powerpoint approach, either as captured through lecture venues or via our desktop computers
These can either be recorded in-camera in a suitably equipment lecture theatre, direct through recent editions of Powerpoint, or via Camtasia and Powerpoint combined.