Video Tutorials > Guidelines, Policies and Help

Step 1: Plan

• Coordinate Your Efforts
• Establish Goals and Audience
• Create an Outline/Script
• Practice, practice, practice

Coordinate Your Efforts

Coordinate your efforts within your department and/or committees to assure that we are not duplicating efforts and are making the most of our limited staff time. This coordination will also help ensure that the presentation of videos is consistent, so that our users and staff find them easy to understand and use. This is true for both public and staff training tutorials.

Existing Public Tutorials
A base of system-wide public tutorials has already been created; please reuse, rather than recreate!

Establish Goals and Audience

Plan for your online tutorial the same way you would plan for a new in-person instruction session. Think about the following:

• Who is your audience? Undergraduates? All students? Anyone at MIT? This will help determine the level of detail you'll want to provide, the familiarity of language used, and the length of your tutorial.
• What are your learning outcomes? In other words, what do you want people to be able to do (or know how to do) after your tutorial is completed?
• Once outcomes are established, think about how you will address those outcomes. For example, if your outcome is "students will be able to log in to Your Account and renew books", what steps will the student need to take to do this task? This leads to creating a script or outline to follow.

Create an Outline/Script

• Write an outline of all the points you want to cover, then try just walking through how you would show this information to someone who was sitting next to you at your computer - take notes on what you did.
• Think about your learning outcomes and make sure you have them covered and adjust your outline as needed.
• You may find it helpful to create a written script - this can be as formal or informal as you like. Be sure to maintain a natural speaking style - don't make it sound like you are reading a script!
• Videos should be no longer than 5 minutes each if possible, unless you are recording an entire talk/presentation and have an audience who expects to view it that way. If it's longer, see if you can break it down into shorter segments.
• Think about your audience and how much background information is needed to get to the heart of your tutorial. Do you need to start at the MIT Libraries home page each time, or start at a database default screen?

Practice, Practice, Practice

• Once you have your script or outline ready, practice it and see how long it takes to complete. If it is long, are there natural stopping places where you can break your tutorial in to 2 or more shorter tutorials?
• Practice recording the tutorial and watch the playback. Is the language you are using too full of jargon? Too formal or too casual? Are you speaking too slowly, or too quickly?

Page last modified: February 29, 2008