Dr. Sean Wilson | Photo by Bob Mihalek
Dr. Sean Wilson is breaking barriers between live and studio recording for online lectures in order to enhance the overall learning experience for his students.
Live and Studio Lectures
After instructing at Penn State for three years, Wilson became tenured at Wright State University in 2008. As an Americanist political science professor, he primarily teaches courses specializing in American politics, constitutional development and the supreme court.
In a YouTube video posted on his channel during the summer of 2020, Wilson breaks down the differences between live and studio lectures.
“I’d give a scripted lecture with a lot of PowerPoint stuff [and] a lot of media involved in it, and then I would record it as I was giving it to you,” said Wilson, “and I would throw it up on the web. I didn’t care what it was like on the web because it was there on my website, number one, and number two it was just for my students.”
Dr. Wilson has made it quite clear that he wants his students to be as engaged as possible with his courses, despite them being fully online this semester. After several years of making digital lectures for online and in-person courses, he has decided to implement new measures that he believes will enhance the quality and participation within his classes.
Innovation not accommodation
“This has nothing to do with COVID. I’m not giving students an accommodation,” said Wilson. “I’m trying to make it so that this is the new way to teach. This is innovation, not accommodation. What I’m doing this semester that’s different from the previous semester is I’m trying to turn my classroom into the studio.”
In order to make his lectures studio-quality, Wilson uses an electro-voice microphone–just as the DJ’s in the 106.8 WWSU studio use–, screen lighting, screen capturing and video editing. These tools allow Wilson to produce better sound quality, provide more engaging visuals, opportunities to interact with presentations and maintain a more tolerable pace for students to follow.
“That’s the thing that people don’t understand. In real time, lecturing is slow, it’s a little bit like a speech. In real time, there’s a different pace in person versus on the video,” said Wilson, “The video can’t be slow. I mean, you’re done if it’s slow, it’s got to move. And so that requires editing and requires a lot of labor.”
Video editor role
Wilson highlighted that the hardest part of this type of video lecturing is adapting to the role of becoming a video editor.
Despite the workload increase, Wilson is adamant that the changes he has implemented in his classes are well worth the effort. He believes that the more opportunities for engagement that are present, the more students will get out of a class without temptation to try and find a watered-down version of the material elsewhere.
“The problem is the student has to do the work to get something out of the class,” said Wilson, “so anybody who’s teaching online has an ethical responsibility to make sure that that is a worthy education experience and that requires more labor.”
Students will continue to see Dr. Sean Wilson’s virtual lectures in a studio format beyond the Fall 2020 semester; next semester, he hopes to also incorporate a GoPro into his equipment to complete the studio experience.
