Strategies and Tools to Create Instructional Videos
Moreland University Collaborates with Modern Classrooms Project to Offer No-Cost Professional Development
Education has changed significantly in the past two years as schools have toggled between online and in-person education. At Moreland University, we strive to give teachers around the world the tools they need to meet the challenges of the moment as resourceful problem solvers and tech-savvy educators. To achieve this, we ground our coursework in our TEACH-NOW® Teacher Preparation Certificate Program, Master’s Degrees, and Professional Development in research-based practices that have been well established over the years.
We are excited to collaborate with the Modern Classrooms Project (MCP) for our no-cost professional development course, “Strategies & Tools to Create Multimedia for Learning” on February 15th, 2022. Teachers in the 21st-century classroom can provide more personalized and relevant resources by creating multimedia of their own to use in the classroom. With tools and strategies to create digital resources, teachers create multimedia in response to the individual needs of their students. In this course, teachers learn concrete strategies and digital tools to create videos and infographics for student learning. Working in collaboration with educators around the world, teachers develop one video or infographic to use immediately in the classroom.
Modern Classroom Project
Founded in 2018 by two public school teachers in Washington, D.C., MCP empowers educators to build classrooms that respond to every student’s needs. Through its free online course, MCP has trained over 35,000 educators in 150+ countries in a self-paced, mastery-based instructional model that leverages technology to foster human connection, authentic learning, and social-emotional growth. MCP’s elementary and high-school educators have been featured by Edutopia, and its founders have both won teaching awards and given TED talks.
Most importantly, from our perspective, rigorous academic research supports the benefits of Modern Classroom instruction for teachers and students alike. Specifically, their model includes blended learning, self-paced structures, and mastery-based grading. MCP’s data shows that, compared to their peers in traditional classroom settings, teachers using this model feel better able to differentiate to individual students’ needs, while students feel more capable and enjoy learning more:
Source: January 2020 survey of 55 educators and 1,929 students at MCP partner schools.
MCP first observed these results prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and has seen similar trends even as teachers shifted learning online throughout 2020 and 2021. (For the full results of MCP’s program evaluations, conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, see MCP’s website.) Because it is grounded in long-established best practices around blended, self-paced, mastery-based teaching and learning, MCP’s instructional model is not only well-suited to the particular challenges of today, but is designed to make a real impact on student and teacher outcomes if and when COVID-19 subsides.
No-Cost Professional Development on Video Creation
A core component of the MCP model is blended instruction: Teachers record their own instructional videos to replace in-class lectures. This allows students to learn at their own pace and frees up teachers to provide targeted individual and small-group support during class. We have partnered with MCP to provide specialized training in a specific area of interest to teachers around the world: instructional video creation. MCP has created a dedicated custom course on instructional-video creation for participants in Moreland University’s no-cost professional development this February. Educators who enroll in our weeklong no-cost course will learn to create instructional videos of their own. In line with its nonprofit mission, MCP has created this course for us for free, and is making its entire set of video-creation materials freely available. For this, we are grateful!
As we gear up for this month’s professional development, join us for a Moreland Meet webinar featuring MCP President & Co-Founder Robert Barnett and MCP Partnerships Manager Emily Dia to discuss both the general MCP model and MCP’s specific tips for video creation. The webinar is on Tuesday, February 8, at 9pm ET/6pm PT, and we hope you’ll join us. Click here to register today!
Will creating videos alone solve the many challenges that COVID-19 poses for teachers and students? Of course not… and MCP wouldn’t say that, either! Videos are not a panacea, nor do they replace teachers. (In fact, videos are only one of four modes of instruction that MCP recommends in their comprehensive instructional model.) What they do, however, is enhance teachers’ ability to spend class time working one-on-one to meet students’ needs, while allowing students to watch (and re-watch) instruction even outside of class time. For teachers struggling with a wide range of learning levels within the same classroom, or students struggling with attendance issues, a few instructional benefits can make a world of difference.
We are thrilled to be partnering with the Modern Classrooms Project on this important initiative as teachers endeavour to develop instructional videos for their own classrooms. We hope you will join us on February 15th, 2022 for our no-cost professional development!
Joseph A. Pearson, M.S.Ed.
Professional Development Officer, Moreland University
