Using the Lightboard to record learning material for Physics

Jackson: My name is Jackson Allen. I'm a casual teacher in EIS and specifically in the School of Physics and the two subjects I teach are PHYS215 and PHYS235. So, two second year, physics subjects and I've used the Lightboard Studio to record footage for the lectures for one of those subjects, PHYS215. 

I knew another teacher in physics who had done something similar. And I was talking to him about and I thought that sounds like a great idea. I already know I want to do hybrid content for my lectures. And this is almost the perfect setup to do that. These sort of pre-recorded high-quality videos where you can engage with the students. The type of content in these lectures is very derivation focused, very equation focused.

So, these would be lots of algebra, lots of calculus going through line by line and proving from concept to result the working that's required for that process.

The reason the Lightboard Studio works for this is it allows students to look through the video, pause, make sure they understand everything step by step, which is something that can be often neglected in lectures, since not all students' abilities are the same. And some students need more time to process certain lines of working. I got very positive feedback from my students across the board for the Lightboard Studio videos that I put together. So, the whole reason that, you know, I want to put all this effort into the teaching in the first place is I want the students to get something out of it and being able to hear directly all of the very positive things that students have to say makes that definitely very worthwhile.

Jackson: Typically, the way that I approached recording my lectures in the Lightboard Studio was to book out fairly long sessions, maybe four hours at a time, and typically I'd walk away with about two hours of recorded footage. So even with all the preparation beforehand, and I would usually put in maybe eight to ten hours of preparation for one of these sessions, you walk away with a relatively small amount of footage.

In terms of the time spent in the studio, the four hours versus the two hours, a lot of that downtime comes in the form of two things. One is clearing off the glass lightboard. It takes a lot more time to clear off the glass than it does to clear off a standard whiteboard. So that's one thing to keep in mind. The other part comes in the form of preparing introductions and conclusions. So I never scripted line by line what I was going to say. Usually I'd have my scripted content that was going to go up on the lightboard, and I would take some time to think about what are the first few sentences that I'm going to say in the introduction to make sure that it's engaging, snappy and clear.

In terms of the preparation process, the lightboard itself has a very limited amount of space. It's smaller than most whiteboards you would use in a standard classroom. And you want to make sure that the video is nice and digestible. It becomes a natural consequence that you make fairly short videos, such that all of the work that you prepare fits on a single lightboard screen.

There were a couple points in the process where I used animations in my videos as opposed to just sticking with handwritten derivations and figures. The reason for this is animations can oftentimes make concepts a lot clearer. I think particularly in physics where you have some complicated processes going on, animations can break things down to be as simple to process for students as possible. Particularly when you have systems that change in time, time-dependent systems, these can be really hard to conceptualise in a single frame. Being able to put out an animation really makes the interplay between different systems a lot clearer. And this is what was really useful being able to overlay animations at the same time as I'm writing up and annotating the system that I'm talking about. I would often times make mistakes while I'm recording my Lightboard Studio videos.

If I made a mistake fairly early on or it's in an important part of the video, I'd usually stop what I'm doing and do a retake of that video. But at the same time, if I made a minor mistake in the middle of recording a video, I'd actually integrate it into the video that I'm trying to make. And it shows students that mistakes happen and that's fine. You want to make sure when you're recording one of these videos, because it's in this pre-recorded format, you don't want to lose the fact that it's a human interacting with the students. I mean, otherwise you could just hand all the students at textbook, get them to read the information themselves. It doesn't matter if they're talking to a real person. That's not what we do. Even though it's a recorded format, I wanted to make sure that the students feel like  they're actually talking to someone, students tend to learn better when they feel like it's a social interaction, that teaching process.

Jackson: So one thing is to make sure that the videos are relatively short and digestible. Having two to three hours of straight recorded footage to replace lectures is not really the power that the Lightboard Studio has. Instead, the power is in having something scripted, precise and concise that you can put out to students that's also very engaging and digestible. And so that's why at least I tried to make particularly short videos and that would be my recommendation as well.

Another thing that people might not think of is that because you're writing on a transparent screen, anything in front of the screen, including yourself, is of course in the footage and on top of what's been written. So if you have a light-coloured shirt that tends to blend into the light-coloured marker that you're using. So make sure that you wear clothing that's going to have all the writing be as high contrast as possible.

The other thing I'd recommend, and I did touch on this before is make sure that you've got a nice, scripted introduction and conclusion which helps bookend your video. It makes sure that you've got a nice well-paced video that doesn't go for too long, and it makes sure that you address the point of the video and that you tie it all up nicely at the end as well.