Dear lecturers of Alexandria Nova,
I’m glad you’re here. First of all, thank you very much for holding your lecture in the Alexandria Nova Network. With people like you, the network has the chance to grow and we are happy to share our knowledge with like-minded people around the world.
Credits: “Earthrise”: Apollo 8 crewmember Bill Anders, December 24th 1968, Public Domain Mark 1.0 (left);
Veikko Kähkönen, Helsinki / Finland (right)
The Alexandria Nova Website is the place where this knowledge is presented. In fact, the blog-post you are reading right here, right now, is kind-of a lecture.
As you know, due to the flood of information on the internet, it is important to present the lecture as well as possible. And it makes a big difference whether the lecture is held live or viewed afterwards! So in order to prepare it for this website, there are a few steps to follow.
For your lecture it’s essential to have:
- a short written introduction with some charming words that make you want to read and see more.
- a picture of the topic or, if available, a graphic from the slideshow you held during the workshop. Maybe a screenshot from the Virtual Meeting!
- information about you! Your name, the title of the session, who you are etc. That could be the same information as in the initial announcment for the lecture.
As a director you know what it means to slip into another role. It is a good practise to slip into the role of the student who accesses the blog post of your online lecture. In addition to a written introduction, you get their attention with a video introduction. Maybe you gave such an introduction – an overview for the topic – at the beginning of your online lecture. Edit and save those 3-5 minutes as an extra video clip.
- Maybe your video introduction already has a great representative picture in it? Let’s use it!
How to go on? There is no “rule” and it really depends on the kind of lecture you are holding:
Workshop-Style Lectures
If your session with the students is more a workshop, it’s great to describe the tasks you gave to the students in some more words. The reader of your lecture is free to complete the tasks by themselves before going on with your next video. As an example, see Gabrielė Labanauskaitė lecture on Automatic Writing, which is a successful combination of short input lectures, tasks and reviews with the students:
- Edit your 2-hour-lecture into smaller pieces and write a few words so that students can easily follow the tasks of the workshop.
Presentation-Style Lectures
Of course we also have 120-minute lectures with really good presentations during our Monday Lectures and believe me, this knowledge is pure gold for our audience. Nevertheless, it is important to:
- give an overview of the contents and possibly divide the video into smaller chapters.
Maybe you had a short break during the zoom-session? Then why not split the video here, because here we have a ‘natural cut’. Write some words on what each part of the video is about. - Maybe you also want to share your slideshow and the links to the videos or websites you showed us during the lesson!
Thoughts on picture- and audio-quality and light
The lecture you hold is your stage. Stage yourself with good picture and audio quality and the audience will love you even more. In this video I show you which setup I have for the videos I uploaded here.
- Even a standard webcam will have much better quality if you take care of the lighting.
- If you don’t have extra light, make sure you’re facing a light source (e.g. the window) and that no lights are behind you. Backlight kills (almost) every video.
- I would recommend a set of two softboxes like these ones: https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B07FNMHPBJ/ref=sr_1_3
- Pay attention to the background. Keep it clean or be aware that the room betrays who you are (video above: a quite chaotic guy. But the tiny robot in the other video’s background is not there by chance!)
Editing the video
I don’t want to go to deep into video editing here and it really doesn’t make any difference which software you are using. To mention a few: I personally use Premiere Pro which you need to buy. For a free video editing software I recommend DaVinci Resolve, which we use on most our school computers. The Apple-Users probably have iMovie as a standard tool on their Mac or, if they did more advanced stuff before, are familiar with Final Cut.
You recognized that every video has the Alexandria Nova Logo as a short Intro and Outro. You can download them here and import them as an image-sequence into your video editing software. If you have no idea on how to do that there are two options: 1) You want to learn how to do it, so we meet for 20 minutes in a zoom meeting and we’ll figure it out together with your software. 2) You take the blue pill and simply send me your videos. I will add intro/outro before uploading them to the website (and only this, I’m not able to do the editing for your videos, sorry… 😐 )
Uploading it to the website
This is the final step for you to become an international star! Right now the website is ‘work in progress’ and the only way to upload the content here is to send everything to Julian Jungel (j.jungel@hfs-berlin.de). Yes, we’re also figuring out how everything works best :-)!