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Creating Evergreen Content for Courses

I am staring at my PowerPoint files from last term, and I notice how many of those slides reference current events. How clever was I to work in the CES show in January into my lectures? How fun was it to post memes (which, let's be honest, my students probably saw 6 weeks before I did) into the pages! And how ominous that I referenced the early concerns for a virus that was spreading halfway across the globe, and certainly would remain a distant point of compassion and interest, but not a very present danger. Those were naive days.

And now, as I prepare to convert portions of those lectures to video for my students, I want to be sure I do not put myself in a difficult position if my Fall course needs to be accessed online (or partially online). I want to create evergreen content - that which can be used well into the future for my course, or other similar courses that may benefit from the information.

To do this, I have made a copy of my Winter term materials on my computer desktop, and renamed it "Spring 20 Online". My older materials are protected, and I can modify my copied files without worry. I am "chunking" my video lectures to be under 10 minutes long, with a goal of 7 minute lecturettes as I get better at this.

I've also downloaded and installed Translator for PowerPoint in case I am giving my presentations during the live sessions (thank you Pam Dougherty for the tip!!)

The first task to tackle is culling and snipping slides. I remove everything that speaks to the current time frame - those items are best left to text-based pages within Canvas, or announcements that will be revised for another class. PowerPoint and screencasting are more difficult to change down the road, so I will reserve all general information for these slides. I have my good microphone, and I'm recording in a quiet room.

I've created my first lecture, which clocked in at a respectable 8 minutes. I will let my students know how long each video is so they can plan accordingly. I've created the captions, and I am uploading the lecture to YouTube as an Unlisted video. It always takes twice as long as we plan - I sat down at 1pm on Sunday to start my videos (two videos under 10 minutes) and it is now 4:30pm on Sunday. Of course, I took a break for a walk and to blow the leaves in my yard, but it feels like a long day for two videos.

Wish me luck!

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