Over the past several years, a number of faculty have begun to incorporate video assignments into their classes. These assignments serve varying pedagogical ends, but they are intended to allow the student to engage the course material on a different level. The trend setter in this area has been Peter Havholm (English). Below you will find some of Peter's assignments along with assignments from other pioneering faculty.

Projects

Peter Havholm (English)

Eliciting emotion

In the Fall of 2003, Professor Havholm asked his First-Year Seminar class to work in teams to make videos which caused specified emotions. With Anthony Liccardi's help in the Instructional Media Center (IMC), they made practice videos, designed story boards, and learned how to use cameras and editing software. In Professor Havholm's opinion, the project seemed to be successful in making the students think about the nature of emotion (the subject of the course) as they worked to try to produce emotions in response to an enacted story on video.

Dramatic structure with Jenna Hayward

In Spring, 2004, Professors Hayward and Havholm taught a course in dramatic structure that they have taught several times in the past. For the first time in this edition of the course, they had students make video chapters of a soap opera. (In the past, students have written scripts.) The exercise was particularly effective because it asked students to use the principles of dramatic structure about which they were theorizing in the course.

Each episode was shown in rough-cut form to the class, which filled out critique sheets. The final "drafts" were posted to the internet: www.wooster.edu/tech/film. They are still there for interested parties to examine.

Jeff Roche (History)

Professor Roche's assignment was a full running production entitled "Wooster in the 60's." Students were divided into groups and required to develop a script according to their content section. Video, audio, still frames and text were all incorporated into this 45min masterpiece. Actual video production techniques were employed, including studio voice over. The project was immense and was done in the G5 lab located in the Art Department. Anthony was the training and equipment coordinator. He also did the final assembly edit. Jeff plans to do a similar documentary assignment in the future.

Harry Gamble (French)

Professor Gamble's assignment was a mock news broadcast. Students were to do a news report in French. A "news-studio" was set up in one of the storage areas of Andrews Library. Students then signed up for times to come in and record. Anthony transferred the assignment to a Quicktime movie for review by the Professor Gamble for final grades. These movies were also posted on BlackBoard. Each broadcast was 5–10 minutes in length.

Technology used

All of the projects made use of Canon mini-DV camcorders to capture the raw video footage. The raw footage was imported into Apple Computers iMovie application for editing and assembly. iMovie is an example of a Non-linear editor (NLE) and is good for smaller projects. Apple Computer's Final Cut Pro is available for larger projects or projects of a more professional nature. All of these tools can be found in the IMC.