With the global e-Learning market expected to grow to $275 billion by 2022, according to a report by Orbis Research, and over 5 billion videos watched on YouTube daily, the appetite for both online learning and video is huge. No surprise, then, that video is an essential element of any compelling courseware. 

Video can be a powerful and engaging teaching tool. But did you know that it can also be used to help students who have dyslexia? According to researchers, people with dyslexia are often very motivated to learn and many have strong academic skills in areas other than reading (source). Dyslexia affects the way that learners process information, so they may have difficulty understanding and remembering things that they see and hear (source), which can impact attainment and wellbeing in the classroom. 

Have you ever heard of flipped or inverted classrooms? This concept has been gaining popularity amongst teachers and students over the last few years. Now, as more learning goes online, schools are looking for courseware to support flipped learning models.

Educators learned something during spring’s sudden transition to remote learning: we simply can’t cover the same amount of material as we do in the classroom. Some teachers are expecting to progress through as little as a fifth of the material they would plan to otherwise cover this school year, leaving little room for extra and co-curricular subjects.

In the not-so-distant past, higher education lectures were almost entirely instructor-led with a heavy focus on written learning materials. Students would spend hours of their week trying to absorb long and complex texts, regardless of their preferred learning style. Then, they would sit in a lecture hall and listen to a professor talk while they listened, often with little audience interaction. For some, this was an effective and enjoyable way to learn but, for many others, it wasn’t quite so engaging.

COVID-19 changed education in an instant. ProQuest customers were drastically affected by global shutdowns and had to completely pivot their research, teaching, and learning models in a matter of days.

Modern technology has had a tremendous impact on our society and accelerated different service sectors in ways that were previously unimaginable. News and politics have largely moved to social networks, banking can be comfortably handled from the comfort of a couch and your car automatically updates itself to become safer and more convenient to use.

The use of video in education isn’t what it was. It was once considered a rare treat for students when their teachers would roll the AV cart into the classroom and turn on a video for an hour or two of passive media consumption. Today, teachers use videos regularly, generally in bite-sized chunks, as an integrated part of their lessons. Rather than consuming them passively, students now actively engage with the content as their teachers facilitate activities and discussions centered around the video. Video is no longer just an occasional supplement: a recent survey shows that video streaming sites are the top digital tool teachers use in the classroom (Common Sense Media, 2019).

Watch this short video hosted by Ed Kendall of Boclips  to learn how you can use video in your virtual learning platforms to keep students engaged and keep teachers coming back for more.

Teachers are busy people. There’s the constant balancing act of lesson-planning, grading papers, meeting with parents and co-workers, and organizing extra-curricular activities. And that’s on top of actually teaching lessons! So when a new resource comes along, it’s easy to see why it might not be a priority. There are so many tools that are wonderfully innovative and rich in pedagogical value, but if they take a long time to implement or aren’t easy to incorporate into existing workflows, they’re likely to fall by the wayside. Fortunately, this problem of “too little time” is one that many EdTech tools are looking to address.