With the sudden urgent need to deliver non-face-to-face teaching due to the coronavirus crisis, it’s an opportunity to learn how to develop online teaching resources. Developing a Powerpoint lecture, with audio, is actually incredibly simple (see my first video here). Below is how I did it. What you’ll need for this is a web camera, or something plugged in to your computer to record audio; and then a YouTube (or other video platform) account (see Step 13).
Open the Powerpoint slideset you want to turn into a video.
Go to the ‘Slide Show’ tab.
Click on ‘Record Slide Show’, then ‘Start Recording from beginning’.
Click on ‘Start Recording’…
…And there you go. Talk through your presentation as you would to a group of students, moving through the slides as you go. You can pause recording if you want—there’s a little box that comes up to click on.
Woah… Actually, maybe before you do the whole thing, just do one or two slides to make sure it’s all working. You use the ‘Esc’ button to get out of it. Then click on ‘From Beginning’ in the Slide Show menu to check that what you’re doing is all OK (if you can’t hear any audio, check your speakers are on. If they are, and you can’t hear audio when you play the presentation, you may need to fix your recording device). And assuming all OK, off you go again (from the start).
One thing I learnt is that you should give a little bit of time before you end talking on a slide, then go on to the next slide, then give a little time, then start talking again. Otherwise, if you talk too close to moving between slides, your audio seems to get a bit cut off.
When you’ve finished your talk, click on the ‘Esc’ button on your keyboard. You’ll now see that there is a little speaker sign in the bottom corner of each of your slides. So the software has recorded your talk per slide. If you click on it, you can hear the audio for that slide (and re-record it if you want).
Now go to the ‘File’ menu, click on ‘Export’, then ‘Create a Video’. The default settings there seem to be fine so you can then just click on ‘Create Video’.
It will ask you where you want to Save the video. Just put it somewhere you can remember, like in the folder where your talk is. Saving it in the default MPEG-4 format seems fine.
The next stage may take some time, maybe 20 minutes or so, so get yourself a cup of tea and sit back, relax, read BBC News online.
Now you’ve got your video in the folder you saved it in. Fab. You might want to click on it just to make sure it’s all OK.
Now’s the slightly trickier bit, if you don’t have a YouTube channel or other place to upload your video. YouTube, I think, is easiest, though bear in mind that it will be publicly available (and therefore not appropriate for confidential material). So what you need to do is to set up a YouTube channel, and you can do that by going to https://www.youtube.com/ and then using your Google Account (and set one of those up if you don’t have one)
Once you’ve got a YouTube account, you just click on the camera sign in the top right hand corner to ‘create a video or post’. Then you click on ‘upload video’, access your file, and it’ll be uploaded to YouTube. Again, this step might take a few minutes so another cup of tea (try a mix of Assam, Darjeeling, and Lapsang Souchong… gorgeous).
Then it’s there, and you’ve got a YouTube video. Just click on the address now and you can send it to your students, or embed the video in Moodle or other learning platform.
Probably the only downside I can see to doing videos this way, aside from confidentiality issues (but at Step 13 you can always upload the video to somewhere secure) is that students don’t get to see you talking. They just see the slides. So it’s a bit impersonal and probably less interesting than it could be if they were seeing you. There’s certainly other software out there that can do that, like Panopto. But if you’re used to Powerpoint, and want to do something relatively straightforward, the steps above seem ideal to create an online learning resource that students can access as part of non-face-to-face learning. It might be a substitute for a lecture or, even better, you could ask students to watch the video, then discuss it with them (for instance, via Zoom video conferencing, or Skype).
Good luck with it. Let me know if there’s anything here I should add or change.