There’s a studio-building boom at colleges, as more campuses work to support experiments in online and hybrid teaching.
Some of the new campus studios, like Harvard’s, rival those at television stations, equipped with green screens, multiple cameras, and microphones. Others are more low-key, housed in a quiet room with a video camera and proper backlighting.
Despite different setups, the purposes are the same. In the age of iPads and smartphones, teaching techniques are trying to catch up with the technologies that surround us. On-campus studios provide one way of doing that.
Gardner Campbell, vice provost for learning innovation and student success at Virginia Commonwealth University, says he’s seen an increase in the last five years in what he calls “self-service production facilities” — on-campus studios that require minimal setup and are easy for any faculty member to use. Indeed, those facilities seem to be appearing more and more frequently; Ohio State University’s studio opened just last fall, and one at Dartmouth College, called the “Innovation Studio,” opened in May.
Many colleges and universities had already built video studios for film majors or student news organizations. But the creation of video studios for general academic work is a more recent trend, one that nods toward the increasingly digitized landscape of higher education.
Mr. Campbell and others say today’s tech-savvy students demand new, engaging teaching methods from their professors. And professors, too, are learning from their students, who grew up with YouTube, the Internet, and a seemingly endless stream of videos at their fingertips. “We’re seeing a generation of faculty that are more willing to experiment,” he says.
Nitrogen and Blowtorch
Pennsylvania State University has created what has become a model for many campuses — a simple-to-use setup that it calls the “One Button Studio.” Before, if students or professors wanted to record video, they had to use complicated cameras and choose from a number of editing software packages, many of which were difficult to use.
But now students and faculty members simply plug a flash drive into the studio’s computer and press a button, which automatically controls the green screen, the lighting, and the video recording (hence the name “One Button Studio”). When they are done, users push the button again and retrieve their flash drive, with their new video saved. The equipment costs less than $10,000 for each studio.
Penn State now has 19 One Button Studios across its multiple campuses, one of them dedicated solely for faculty use. And a number of other universities, including Abilene Christian, Notre Dame, and Ohio State, now use the model for their own in-house studios, in the hope that more people will be encouraged to try out something new in their classes.
Regardless of the type of studio, professors are using them for a variety of purposes. One professor at Ohio State recorded a video of herself experimenting with liquid nitrogen and a blowtorch. Others, at Harvard Law School, invited guests to the university’s underground studio to film an interview, to be shared with their classes later. Anticipating snow days, some professors at Penn State prerecorded lectures for students to watch when classes were canceled.
At some universities, the push to create on-campus production studios comes from university efforts to increase technology use in the classroom.
Three years ago, Ohio State embarked on its “Digital First Initiative,” to rewire its campus and find ways for professors to improve their classes by using technology like video and other multimedia. The university built new spaces, including a video studio and an audio studio, that allow faculty members to create videos and recordings “really easily without having to go out and find someone to develop and produce content for them,” says Liv Gjestvang, Ohio State’s associate vice president for learning technology.
Ms. Gjestvang says more faculty members are now exploring flipped-classroom models — in which they record lectures for students to watch before class and use class time for discussion — as well as other types of teaching and research to make course material more engaging.
Video as Classroom Imperative
Professors at Ohio State can sign up for time slots in the production rooms and, essentially, do as they wish with their time there. Similarly, Dartmouth just opened what Anthony Helm, head of digital media and library technologies, called a “low barrier-to-entry studio,” where instructors can either bring their own equipment or borrow some from the college’s media center for filming, with as much or as little guidance as necessary.
As with all learning media, Virginia Commonwealth’s Mr. Campbell warns that professors should think carefully about how they plan to incorporate video into their classes, lest they detract or distract from lessons. He also says that, despite the surge in video studios and video production for classroom use, it will take a while for creative use of video in the classroom to become widely popular across higher education.
At some colleges, media teams sit down with professors ahead of time and lay out long-term strategies to determine how video may enhance the learning experience of students in their courses.
“The academic content drives the use of technology,” says Ben Maddox, chief instructional-technology officer at New York University. Faculty members there can choose to use a production studio in the main library, where they can do most of the filming themselves, or record at a more high-tech studio with the assistance of media specialists. The media team offers instructors a number of planning worksheets to encourage them to think more about the purpose of videos in their courses.
One way or another, Mr. Campbell argues, widespread use of video in the classroom is inevitable.
“We’re surrounded by examples of people using video in really effective and interesting ways, and so it now becomes an imperative,” he says. “This has become part of the language that we’re all speaking, or at least learning to read, this language of video.”
