Video essays in the curriculum: Collaboration across the university to develop multimodal learning and digital media skills

Video essays are an innovative method for incorporating media analysis and digital humanities in the classroom. Workshop participants will gain insights into how to use video essays as a teaching method by exploring tools, techniques and rubrics, and how the promote collaboration across the university.

This workshop introduces how video essays are a powerful teaching tool, and how assigning them promotes open access and collaboration across the university. A video essay is a short online video that illustrates a topic, expresses an opinion and develops a thesis statement based on research through cutting and editing videos, sound and images. Video essay production is increasingly viewed as a valid academic activity that affords multimodal assessment of research, critical thinking and digital media skills. They can be made by students with little or no background in mediamaking. This workshop will feature examples of short video essays and how they are incorporated into courses, and demonstrate how to work collaboratively with librarians, technologists and faculty members. In particular we will highlight open access materials available for video essay production. Workshop participants will be tasked with designing a video essay assignment for a course, identify how to collaborate with other departments, and to summarize resources they need to make the assignment work at their institution.