Creating and Uploading Instructional Videos
Many departments have video files of whiteboard lectures that you may want to use in your Moodle course, or you may want to create some lecture or presentation videos to use for future online courses. Showing you how to create video for your course and optimize the video footage for online courses is outside this book's scope, but I can identify resources that will guide you to create what you need, and I advise you on the best tools to use. Many basic tools are bundled in your computer or can be downloaded for free. The following list is filled with advice, good ideas, and links to resources.
You don't have to be an expert to create videos and convert them to formats supported by Moodle and viewable by all browsers. The following Web sites demonstrate how to use various free video creation resources and download conversion tools:
- Free Technology for Teachers (www.freetech4teachers.com/p/video-creation-resources.html): Select the Free Downloads and Free Video Creation Resources links. Other than free downloads, you find tutorials and more — worth a visit.
- Kioskea.net (http://en.kioskea.net/faq/44-how-to-make-a-video-clip): An excellent tutorial.
- Videomaker (www.videomaker.com): Loads of help, ideas, and links to resources.
- YouTube (www.youtube.com/t/howto_makevideo): This is a great resource from YouTube on making and optimizing your videos. You can upload them to YouTube, optimize them in correct format, and then make them available on YouTube or download them and link to the video files in Moodle.
- TeacherTube.com (www.youtube.com/t/howto_makevideo): Has more instructional information and a link to optimize your video.
- For Windows OS (www.opensourcewindows.org)
- For Mac OS (www.opensourcemac.org)
- PowerPoint conversion, if you use media files and animation (www.ispringsolutions.com/products/ispring_free.html): This is a free PowerPoint Flash converter that keeps all sound and video and even compresses the files. You can use OpenOffice to create a presentation and then select Export from the OpenOffice File menu and have a Flash file. Simple!
After you save your videos as .flv or .swf formats, you can upload them to your Moodle course. The process follows the similar procedure of uploading other files to your course (which I discuss in detail in Chapter 5). Here are a couple extra steps that you need to take:
- Upload video files to your Moodle Files folder: The most efficient way to link to your files from the course resources page is to first create a folder in your Moodle Files folder and upload them there. You can upload Zip files, which Moodle unzips when they're needed. The Files folder is accessible from the Course Administration block.
- Choose from three options to display the video: Embed it in a Web page, link directly to it, or place it in the HTML block.