I tend to be fairly skill-development-focused in my teaching, and this has led me to make a number of my classes writing intensive (WI) or speaking intensive (SI). Most schools have some kind of writing intensive equivalent, but the speaking intensive designation is more rare. It means there are a certain number of required oral communication assignments in the class with instruction on oral communication – usually from a disciplinary-specific perspective – and a focus on helping students become more aware of their own strengths and weaknesses in the context of oral communication.
Even now, at 47-years-old, I score high on speaking anxiety (although lower than I used to), so I both understand why students may not want to take these classes while also seeing them as critical. I didn’t start to develop skills to manage my anxiety until I started forcing myself to engage in public speaking regularly, so I hope my classes can offer some safer environments for students to step out of their comfort zones and work on becoming more successful communicators – after all, we all always have room to grow!
One of the challenges with these courses is finding enough hours for every student to do the required number of presentations. When I was struggling to get the required assignments built into one of my 20-person classes some years ago, one of the senior faculty connected to our communications program suggested I have students record short talks on video for one of the assignments, and it was a total lightbulb moment for me. Students could get more opportunities to practice giving talks, and at least one of them wouldn’t have an audience and could be done as many times as needed until they felt comfortable to submit it.
When I started doing this, not all students carried a device with them that would easily let them record talks, so I sometimes had students make appointments to borrow a camera and record in one of our labs, but it’s only become easier as video technology has migrated to our phones. YouTube makes it easier than ever as students can upload their talks and just submit them as a link, so there’s no need for complex file-sharing anymore.
I’ve also found these help me as a teacher since I can watch talks more than one time to separately focus on content and delivery (something I still struggle to do at the same time). This allows me to provide more detailed and focused feedback to students (and helps compensate for those space-out moments that even teachers have).
This has also led to me teaching new skills – like how to caption a video (and why you need to edit YouTube auto-captions). This let’s me talk about accessibility and the difference between accessibility and accommodation – something that students can take with them into other realms of their school, work, and personal lives!
It’s also led to me adding extra-credit assignments like watching their own video talk – sometimes with a speaking consultant at our writing and speaking center on campus – and engaging in critical reflection of what did and didn’t go well in terms of both content and delivery. It’s far harder for students to engage in this type of critical reflection – particularly the very anxious students – without a video to reference.
There are endless variations of this. I generally don’t want this to be a video editing assignment where more tech-skilled students have advantages, so I generally go with an un-edited 1-take format (albeit with as many attempts as desired before deciding on their 1-take). You can have them talk to the camera, record voiceover for a slideshow, etc. When I teach double sections of classes, pre-recorded talks are often the only way I can mange the workload, so they aren’t just a tool for small classes.
Have you ever used recorded talks in your classes? Do you want more details on some of the specific assignments I’ve done with video talks? Share your ideas, and let me know if you want me to talk more about this. If so, I’ll put that on my calendar for a future post or two.