How to Set Up Assignments for Students to Give Oral Presentations on Video

Abstract

For the past two years, we have been assigning students to give oral presentations via video recording to facilitate our teaching of communication skills to both online and on-campus students. We did not invent the idea. Once a multitude of new technologies began to emerge in the 1990s, there were advocates for their potential to foster student engagement, active learning, and collaboration (Bonk and King 1998; Soloway 1993). In the following decade the pedagogical value of student-generated video for online and distance learning became clear and was well explored in research (Comeaux 2005; Green 2008; Kearney and Schuck 2005). Despite these developments, most university instructors have not taken advantage of student-generated videos, possibly because they are either unaware of the option or they do not know how to set up and assess video presentations. We hope this article will change that.