One Minute Lectures

There are books like the One-minute Manager that are wildly popular.  So, why don’t we have  a one-minute professor?

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education presents the use of 60-second “micro lectures” which become  popular among students of San Juan College.    This format also quickly boosted course enrollment according to the Chronicle article.

At Oklahoma Christian University I also know that Dr. Merritt from the School of Business Administration uses short, one-to-two minute video lectures to broadcast content to students.    Doing so goes with the general trend of using more and more “reusable, shareable learning object”, namely learning content presented in short, discreet units (nuggets) that can be used in multiple lectures, especially online.

You do not have to have your entire online or hybrid courses to be made up of one-minute lectures, but having learning presented that way surely will help students whose attention span is getting short (who isn’t?)  In addition,  “one-minute” does not have to be a rigid rule to follow.   The general idea is that when you present information online, keep it fairly short.  You do not want an entire lecture to be replicated online as a talking-head kind of video.  It will not be very effective to keep students engaged.

Podcast capture and ItunesU in your blackboard course can make it fairly easy to deploy such short lectures.  If you are not sure you are using this on a large scale, try using photobooth (with Mac) to record some instructional units, upload to your Blackboard course, and see how it goes.  If you like it, set up an iTunesU  site for your course to house your short lectures.