Screencasts - LearnMechE - Educational Resources for Engineering Courses

Screencasts

Screencasts are short screen captures, usually of a tablet PC, with instructor narration. They supplement textbooks and lectures by featuring solutions to example problems, explanations of concepts, software tutorials, descriptions of diagrams, and material reviews. They are made and reviewed by faculty. (CC) indicates the entire topic has corrected closed captioning. There are over 600 screencasts available for the following engineering courses/topics:

65 videos	27 videos	182 videos	52 videos
64 videos	52 videos	4 videos	8 videos
24 videos	105 videos	18 videos

Benefits of Using Screencasts

Publications on the use of screencasts in courses at the University of Colorado Boulder:

J.L. Falconer, G.D. Nicodemus, J. deGrazia, and J.W. Medlin, “Chemical Engineering Screencasts”, Chemical Engineering Education 46, 58 (2012).
J.L. Falconer, J. deGrazia, J.W. Medlin, M. Holmberg, “Using Screencasts in Chemical Engineering Courses”, Chemical Engineering Education 43, 286 (2009).

Student feedback in courses using screencasts has been positive, with the majority of students finding them useful or very useful. In one student-survey (Fluid Mechanics course), over half of the students claimed to have watched over half of the Fluid Mechanics screencasts.

With screencasts, instructors can reach a larger percentage of their student pool than office hours alone, and supplement coursework with advanced content/review material that may not be efficiently covered in the limited time available in class. Screencasts allow instructors to cater to students' different learning styles by providing them alternative resources to textbooks and lectures, as well as valuable review materials. Furthermore, the ability to stop, rewind, and re-watch the videos allows students to learn at their own pace.

How to Create Screencasts:

The following resources can help instructors develop these relatively easy-to-create, high-impact educational tools. We usually use tablet PCs with OneNote for writing out problems and Camtasia (which records the computer screen) for audio-video editing.

General:

Why Prepare Screencasts? - describes reasons for preparing screencasts.
Advantages of Screencasts for Explaining Diagrams/Graphs - demonstrates the advantage of using screencasts to explain diagrams and graphs.
Using Screencasts to Explain Equations - discusses the advantages of using screencasts to explain equations.
Tips for Making Effective Screencasts - based on our experiences at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Before-After Editing - brief overview of how we edit screencasts to enhance the learning experience.

Camtasia/OneNote:

Brief Tutorial on Making Screencasts - brief example of recording and producing videos in Camtasia Studio 7.
Brief Camtasia Tutorial - pdf on the basics of using Camtasia/simple methods of recording and producing screencasts
Video Tutorial on Camtasia Basics - quick-start suggestions on making screencasts using Camtasia.
Creating Video Tutorials - Camtasia tutorials for editing and producing screencasts.
Using OneNote - describes basic properties of OneNote, its advantages, and how it can be used.
Using OneNote in Class - demonstrates how to use OneNote in class (aimed at instructors).
Using OneNote to Prepare Screencasts - describes how to use Microsoft Office OneNote to record a screencast

How to Link To/Embed Our Screencasts:

Send students directly to LearnMechE by sending them the URLs: learnmeche.com or www.youtube.com/c/LearnMechE
Embed video in your website: Find the video of interest on YouTube, right click on the video, and in the resulting menu, click "Copy embed URL". HTML code should pop-up on the screen. Paste the resulting code into your own source.
Embed video in PowerPoint: Insert → Video from website, embed the YouTube code as described in previous bullet point.
Download video from iTunesU: Go to our iTunesU page (requires iTunes), download the relevant file, and re-host on another server of interest.