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Lecturer Marjolein Haagsman teaches the block 3 course Biotechnology and Society to 130 first-year Biology students. Much of the elective course takes place online, so Haagsman easily managed to expand those elements when the coronavirus measures went into effect. With the right tools, an educational video clip can be produced in no time.

Saving time

Teaching online is nothing new for Haagsman. She has long preferred to divide her lectures into brief knowledge clips, for example. She records a separate video of no more than eight minutes for each topic. “That’s my preferred method, because the students can go through the material at their own pace”, Haagsman explains. “I’ve also noticed that I can say what I want to say in a much more compact form, so it saves me time - at least, if I don’t spend too much time editing afterwards.”

Straight home

Nevertheless, working entirely from home was a change for Haagsman as well. During the last few weeks of the course, her students work in groups on an assignment for a real company. Normally, Haagsman would explain those assignments during a lecture. “But when we heard that Friday that we’d have to start teaching remotely, I went straight home and recorded a video for that too. I was able to use it the very next Monday.”

Handy tools

Haagsman prefers to record video clips using Camtasia and Scalable Learning (see ). These tools make it easy to combine audio, video and slides, or to enrich knowledge clips with questions for students. With Scalable Learning, you can even see which students have watched a video clip (or not), because they have to log in with their Solis ID. Unfortunately, the company behind Scalable Learning will stop offering the tool after the summer, but Haagsman will continue looking for an alternative with comparable functions.

Digital awards

When Utrecht Science Park was still open to all, Haagsmans’ students worked in groups on the assignment ‘Make your own bacteria’. It was a theoretical assignment, so the students were able to continue working on it despite the coronavirus measures. But Haagsman had to come up with an alternative for the awards ceremony, so she naturally chose the form of a short video. She will send the award, a keychain in the form of an E. coli bacteria, to the winners via the post.