After 25 years as a typographical designer, Richard Hunt knows the value of visual communication — which makes it a little ironic that his online course at OCAD University, an art-and-design college in Ontario, initially released lectures in an audio-only format. Last year students accustomed to on-campus learning felt that Mr. Hunt’s “History and Evolution of Typography” course needed greater visual engagement than lecture slides could provide. This fall Mr. Hunt, an assistant professor, hopes to correct that, starting with a video trailer that went live just a few weeks ago. “We thought a trailer would put a face to the voice,” he says.
The new course trailer, released on the college’s internal network and on YouTube, begins with a simple shot of Mr. Hunt speaking. “It’s a way of selling the course to students who resist the online format,” he says.
Course trailers have become increasingly common at universities across North America, as a strategy for attracting students and for putting a public face to the institutions. Several universities have set up official media teams to help faculty members create them. Though such videos seem like a natural development in an age of online and multimedia coursework, they’ve also entered the brick-and-mortar classroom, signaling that a branding tactic once reserved for the marketplace has entered the marketplace of ideas.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the first-ever course trailer, but they began to appear within a few years of the 2005 launch of YouTube. Harvard University was an early adopter, in part because students there spend the first week of the semester “shopping” for courses they may want to take. Short videos can be shared across social networks to boost student interest and attendance, and as Mr. Hunt’s trailer suggests, they have an intimacy that course catalogs and posters lack. Course trailers have now been used at institutions including the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Ottawa, and Baylor and Brown Universities.
In addition to their logical home on the Internet, trailers have found their way into the classroom. On the first day of class in Harvard’s most popular undergraduate course, Computer Science 50, the lights dim in a wood-paneled theater that seats 1,000 students. A nostalgic pop song plays from the speakers, and students watch a series of video clips from the prior year. At first, says the professor, David J. Malan, “it was just to get them excited in those first three minutes of class.”
Though the course teaches computer languages like C, PHP, and JavaScript, Mr. Malan has learned to borrow the visual language of film. “We’ve taken it, I dare say, to a different level,” he says. Students in 2014 watched time-lapse sequences styled after the TV show House of Cards, and learned of a Yale University collaboration from a video that featured Sesame Street puppets. Such stylized videos may have no clear connection to course content, but they shape the identity of the course.
From Fuzzy to High-Def
When Baylor offered to produce official trailers for faculty members a year ago, Trey Cade, director of the Baylor Institute for Air Science, was one of the first to sign up. “Aviation science is not a typical degree program, so we always have the challenge of letting prospective students know that we even exist,” he explains. The target audience for Mr. Cade’s videos included not only Baylor undergraduates but also high-school students wondering where and what they should study.
In this sense, course trailers are an extension of earlier promotion strategies like email advertisements because they’re designed, like a promotional pamphlet, for students outside the university.
Course trailers take many forms. Some resemble short TED talks, featuring slide shows and brief explanations from faculty members. Others mimic film trailers, using dramatic music and snappy slogans. Production quality varies widely, from fuzzy clips shot on iPhones to professionally edited high-definition montages. Baylor’s aviation-science trailer includes aerial footage gathered during student flights.
George Veletsianos, an associate professor at British Columbia’s Royal Roads University who studies education technology, thinks that course trailers can empower scholars to reach new and wider audiences. The most successful videos are viewed by a few thousand people online — minuscule figures compared with viral YouTube fodder, but impressive for courses that may enroll only a few dozen students. Richard Hunt’s video has almost 100 views on YouTube so far. “To some degree, I’m not convinced people are going to watch it,” Mr. Hunt says, but he’s still glad students can. “If they want the engagement, it’s there.”
Videos designed for outside audiences might also have an impact within the classroom, says Mr. Veletsianos. “Once we consider a different medium, we might change the way we do things. We might expand our tool kit of teaching.”
For example, a professor who tries to explain the value of physics on YouTube might come to appreciate the advantages of visual learning — or might discover videos made for similar courses, thus building connections to a wider scholarly community.
There are less-optimistic interpretations, of course — starting with the fact that many trailers generate buzz without discussing actual scholarship. Though Baylor’s aviation-science trailer includes faculty and student interviews, focusing on the practical value of the subject material, Harvard’s CS50 trailers aim to set a mood. They certainly don’t try to explain how PHP scripts work.
Course ‘Branding’
One of the most popular course trailers on YouTube, meanwhile, is a grainy one-minute montage from Toronto’s Centennial College that uses cinematic music to make community-college calculus look like an action movie. Since April 2014 it has attracted 91,000 views — several times the size of the college’s student body.
Course trailers raise some questions about the role of marketing in higher education. Hollywood releases film trailers to compete for a limited pool of moviegoers. At universities, where student interest affects the influence and funding of academic departments, it’s easy to imagine trailers’ becoming a strategy to competitively attract students. And certain disciplines — like film studies, computer science, or communications — may simply be better equipped to present their work in video form.
That helps explain why universities like Baylor and Harvard now produce official trailers, expanding the practice to faculty members who lack the time or media savvy to create videos independently.
Mr. Malan, who teaches Harvard’s CS50 course, believes that competition is an asset rather than a cause for concern. A few years ago, he felt uncomfortable describing course-related videos and promotional materials as a form of “branding.” His course uses T-shirts, events, and slogans to get the word out, but they aim to spark discussion without telling students that they should enroll.
More recently, however, Mr. Malan has embraced the idea that his course is also a brand. Not all professors will share his enthusiasm for marketing, but the course’s enrollment is six times as large as it was a decade ago.
“If the end result is more excitement, more engagement, and hopefully more learning,” he says, “then all the better if we’re trying to outdo ourselves.”
Daniel A. Gross is a freelance writer and public-radio producer based in Boston. Find him on Twitter @readwriteradio.
