Creating a Screen Capture Video

Note: this post was created as an assignment for the course LDT300x Instructional Design: Digital Media, New Tools, and Technology. You can learn more about this course (and the Micro-Master's program it is a part of) here. This is not meant to be an in-depth tutorial on how to use screen capture technology.

Photo by Wahid Khene on Unsplash

For this activity, I will be identifying an instructional need, creating a storyboard, developing a screencast or animation, and publishing the results to YouTube. Given that automatic closed-captioning is not sufficient for all of our diverse learners, post-publication, I will also be including edited closed captioning.

Instructional Need: Faculty are confused about the optimal way to integrate online Open Educational Resources (OERs) into their course shells. As such, the instructional designer (me!) will need to create a short tutorial demonstrating the steps to link OER into the learning management system (LMS). For the purpose of this tutorial, the instructional designer (yep, still me) has determined that using a screen capture method is the ideal way to demonstrate this process for faculty.

Storyboard: Remember from this post that storyboarding can be extremely useful for helping instructional designers plan, script, and execute online educational videos. Please view the storyboard for the OER tutorial below:

Integrating OER Template.docx

Download DOCX • 25KB

Now, it's time to create the video!

Video: There are multiple options for screen recording. For example, you can use the built-in screen recording options (QuickTime Player for Mac); however, I realized that there was a lag between when I started recording and when the application was picking up my narration. (Apparently, this has to do with hardware processing, read more here). This was definitely not going to work. There are several free screen recording applications: Screencast-O-Matic and Screencastify are two of the most popular. I chose to use Screencastify for this video (which, by the way, is a Google product, so needs to be used with the Google Chrome browser).

After creating my video, I double-checked the script that I had created in my storyboard and made any text edits that were necessary and saved the document to upload to YouTube for closed captioning. Please be advised that when you upload subtitles that you have created yourself, it can take several hours for YouTube to synch and update your video.

Here is the final product:

---

After completing this assignment, I have a new respect for people who work as graphic designers, content creators, videographers and editors. I not only had to re-record my video multiple times, but I uploaded the wrong file to YouTube and had to go back into my video editing software and re-export the file (first to a flash drive and later to YouTube).