Jeff Tunney is the Director of the NVU Center for Teaching and Learning. The following appeared as a weekly “teaching tip” that Jeff sends to NVU faculty. More teaching tips can be found on the NVU CTL website.
YuJa is the Vermont State Colleges video platform. For those of you who have not used it before, it can be accessed by navigating to https://vsc.yuja.com/ and entering your VSC portal username and password or, in most cases, by clicking the ‘YuJa’ link in the left-hand navigational pane within your course(s) in Canvas.
For a broad introduction to this software, I’d recommend watching the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVkHql0gQO4
Regarding usage, the tips below as well as the sites that follow might be beneficial to faculty members who would like to learn more about this resource.
Tips:
Brevity – Research has shown that students are most likely to engage effectively with shorter videos that are less than seven or eight minutes in length. For this reason, it can be advantageous to use multiple topic-based videos rather than one lengthy lecture.
Record Difficult Concepts – If there are concepts or topics that students consistently have trouble grasping, it can be beneficial to record your explanation and share it with students as needed. This practice can be very helpful in improving efficiency and reducing student confusion.
Record an Instructor Introduction – In addition to text based documents, a ‘start of semester’ recording can be helpful in disseminating classroom and university policies. Also, a warm welcome message can be advantageous in setting a positive tone at the beginning of a new term.
Flipped Classrooms – If you’d like class time to focus predominantly on discussions, assignments, and projects, try recording your lectures. This practice can also be helpful in fostering student accountability by requiring that content be viewed prior to the start of class.
Auto Captioning – Using the captioning feature plays an important role in maintaining accessibility.
Sites:
- Tips for Using the YuJa Video Platform for Education
- 10 Tips for Recording Engaging Content in Your Classroom
- How YuJa Can help Instructors Outside the Classroom
- Getting Started within the Video Platform Through Canvas
- Requesting Auto-Captions
VSC Tutorials for Faculty:
Introduction – https://vsc.yuja.com/Dashboard/Permalink?authCode=377319811&b=1972689&linkType=video
Intermediate – https://vsc.yuja.com/Dashboard/Permalink?authCode=1316011376&b=1972695&linkType=video
Helpful Workshop:
The NVU Center for Teaching and Learning collaborated with the Castleton CTL to offer a workshop on The Basics of Yuja facilitated by Senior Instructional Technology Specialist Sean Dailey from Vermont Technical College. You can find a recording of the video here: https://vsc.yuja.com/V/Video?v=6432875&node=28468558&a=1255241756&autoplay=1
