Online Video Sharing For Education

Once again, I have a new tool for my toolbox of online educational tools. Video sharing provides yet another method for communication to occur between students and instructors within the confines of the virtual classroom. This was another week of learning that can result in practical application for distance learning education.

Like photo sharing and podcasting, online video sharing can enhance the communication that occurs between students and instructors participating in distance learning courses. Instructors can create and post videos to provide students with specific details or instructions to an assignment. And like photo sharing, instructors may have personal video collections from their own experiences that could be used to help students connect their written text or materials with visual aids of a specific location or procedure. Instructors can also use video to post their own lectures and even to simply add variety to the methods of presentation for their course materials.

Much like photo sharing, students can use video sharing to document their completion of assignments that might include physically visiting a specific location, or the completion of a model or project and demonstration of how it works. Videos might also be used by students as a means of documenting an oral presentation or speech assignment. Furthermore, students and instructors might find that video introductions are a more personal method for completing introductory assignments that usually occur during the early days of a new class.

As you might have already noticed, my video sharing assignment is posted on two different video hosting sights. The sites are Vimeo and Pixorial, and I will explain how I ended up with both.

I started with Pixorial. The video was fairly easy to upload, and the site features a few options like the ability to create a title. But once I submitted my clip for posting, Pixorial took about six days to notify me it was ready to view. In the meantime, I became nervous and thought that my request to post the clip somehow did not work. I needed to find another site provider.

I then began to explore Vimeo. Once again, the video was easy to upload, but the title feature was not present like with Pixorial. The Vimeo viewing screen turned out to be larger than Pixorial, and my description of the video is posted directly under the video for easy viewing. And Vimeo took only about 10 minutes to notify me that the video was ready to post. Once the Pixorial video finally became available, I decided to post both to better document my experience.

Overall, I found this exercise to be fairly easy on both sites. Once again, I could certainly see myself using online video sharing while teaching an online class. Furthermore, I expect to take advantage of these services for my own personal use as well.