4-5 A Visit to Barb's Basement- The Secret Sauce of Learning How to Learn

And here we are in my basement. This is where we video tape most of learning how to learn and where we’re video taping most of Mindshift. Okay, so maybe the basement’s a little cleaner than usual. You can see the fireplace mantle is on one side, the door is on the other. As I mentioned earlier, originally I learned everything I needed to know about how to set up a studio and how to edit film by searching things out online. I did most of the video editing for learning how to learn myself with some help from my husband Phil who is also the man behind the camera. It’s not like I picked up editing in a second. It took me several months of messing around every spare second I could before I started feeling comfortable with the video editing program. This experience with editing taught me the great value that video editors can bring to the table in MOOC making. You can see, for example, the improvement in the videos in Mindshift versus those of learning how to learn because I’m now working with McMaster’s great video editing team. Obviously not all MOOCs are made this way. But looking behind the scenes at our basement, and the scripting and editing process, actually gives you a sense of what’s going on behind the scenes in a fair bit of online learning so you can make better decisions about what works for you. You can see the green screen here. It’s just a cheap cloth on a frame that we bought online. You can see the rest of the basement around me. There’s the teleprompter hood, the edges of the lights here and there’s the fireplace and the edges of the room. How do green screens work? Well, I just stand in front of it like this. Then we crop using a video editing program to get rid of the stuff on the edges. Then we stick whatever background we want behind me, just like the weather person at your local TV station. I can be in the jungle or in the city. We can even just stick in an animation from PowerPoint. This is all a pretty straightforward process, although trust me, just like anyone when I first tried to do it, I had my share of frustrations. Notice the infinite effect that we simulated by just draping the cloth gently forward. You might be surprised to learn that even top notch MOOC making facilities that I’ve toured around the world often don’t have a full length green screen. Why might a full length green screen be important? Because from an evolutionary perspective, things that suddenly loom closer to you were more likely to kill you. So motion that appears to jump closer as when you go from full body to half body on video, activates all sorts of neuro attention layers. Motion of all types, especially unexpected motion really attracts attention. The teleprompter is an interesting story. MOOC makers sometimes advise instructors not to use a teleprompter. This is because some instructors read like this, and their scripts are super pedantic. But the truth is, a good script allows you to carefully plan a MOOC so there isn’t a wasted second, and if you review and edit the writing, you can get rid of most of that yucky academic sound. Writing a script gives a great chance to think about the metaphors and seemingly silly stuff that can help quickly convey key ideas. Here, in fact, is the script for Mindshift. Notice my instructions about what I’m supposed to do, or where the images are supposed to go. I can put the script into Word’s outlining view. You can see the titles there for each video. Using the outline view allows me to easily rearrange videos as I’m writing the scripts and trying to devise the best ways to convey ideas. There are great books about conventional subjects, introductory statistics or psychology for example but MOOC making is a whole new world. It provides a new canvas for creative ways of teaching and learning. For example, a conventional MOOC on learning on how to learn might have had a week on the history of education, another week on theories of learning, maybe another week on how babies learn. Finally, there might be some information at the end on best practices for learning. There might have been one short video on neuroscience. Nothing too much because after all, neuroscience is complex. But in our learning how to learn, we flipped all that on its head starting from a foundation of neuroscience and using metaphor and humor to spiral the learner quickly through the key ideas. Great MOOCs can synthesize the material in a whole new way. In a way that hasn’t previously been done through conventional class work, and that you can’t get very easily through books. In our next video, let’s take a look what to look for in well made MOOCs.