Preventing "Digital Dust": Supporting the Creation and Dissemination of High-Quality Videos for Advanced Technological Education

At ATETV (http://www.atetv.org), Pellet Productions has produced and hosted over 250 high-quality videos highlighting educational and career opportunities in Advanced Technological Education (ATE). Many ATE grantees and other educators are not only using ATETV's digital assets for teaching, for recruiting students, and for training faculty, but are also creating their own content. With the proliferation of small, affordable digital video cameras and smartphones, grantees can now easily capture, produce, and share content. However, in many cases, these home-grown video projects fall short of meeting their goals and engaging their audience, largely for reasons having to do with the way the video content is produced and disseminated. These time-consuming, well-intentioned ventures thus lead to "digital dust." In this project, Pellet Productions will develop an instructional process to support ATE grantees as they plan, produce, disseminate, archive, and measure the outcomes of their own accessible digital videos. In addition, content created by ATE grantees will be curated into an online video library accessible to all users. These enhancements to ATETV will support the spread of effective teaching-and-learning materials and strategies, as well as the development of faculty expertise.

The project team will develop, test, and refine an "ATE Digital Video Content Conceptual Framework" and support system. The framework will be based on the industry standard video production process but will be carefully refined for college faculty and administrators, with a sensitivity toward their skills and resource constraints. The project team will also establish a tiered system of support to ensure that grantees have the tools and confidence to produce high-quality content that will engage their audience. A key component of this effort will be a five-part course that presents the foundational skills for producing digital video content, accompanied by an interactive e-book that will help grantees organize their thoughts, articulate goals and objectives for their videos, and follow a production checklist of necessary components. The e-book will also include a series of templates (such as a goals-and-objectives worksheet) and outline and scripting formats. The project team will work with a subset of ATE grantees to test and refine the resources. The success of this cohort of participants in producing and disseminating content will be shared throughout the ATE community and with other groups of technician educators.