The majority of the teaching I do is in a classroom setting, with 12 computers and a fixed monthly class calendar. My audience is mainly adults who wish to improve their Office Skills and employ-ability.
About 2 years ago, I was able to consistently fill my classroom regardless of class and time. My statistics were great. However, in the past year, attendance numbers started to dwindle. I am not alone: my peers at other locations are experiencing the same trend.
My intuition tells me this because students have less attention spans than in the past, and have come to expect their education to come to them- just like their entertainment and amazon purchases. Is this expectation unrealistic? Perhaps not. It is time to make library patron classroom education as easy to access as many other commodities we consume daily.
I would like to integrate two technologies into the library education process and get to a more Blended approach for our technology courses; video and podcasts.
My plan is as follows-
Begin to video record all of my classes. Create edited video versions of the most popular Business related technology courses. Offer these on youtube or the library website for streaming. In addition, I would like to create podcast versions of the same material from the audio and offer on a resources like Soundcloud for download.
I think this would reach an audience who wants to attend class but does not have the time or means to get in the classroom. We could improve the accessibility of the videos by providing closed captioning.
Over the years, some students have recorded my lectures in the classroom, and reported that this was an excellent resource for them as they were completing their own work at home. This planted the seed for me to consider recording my class sessions. Recently, I have started to learn how to make videos and record audio for podcasts, so this is a very interesting topic for me.
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