Last Thursday, we packed ourselves and our audio visual kit into a hire car and took a road trip through rural Northumberland up to Galashiels.
For the last year, our colleague Simon has been working with the Borders College on an ambitious e-learning project.
An enthusiastic and very capable team up there is embarking on a college-wide transformation to embed high quality e-learning in all curriculum areas.
We’ve been helping them along the way.
- Simon has been seconded as an in-house e-learning expert throughout the project.
- We’ve run a comprehensive programme of training for the team, including digital storytelling, podcasting and web writing skills in addition to e-learning training.
- And Will, one of our Service Managers, has also been helping and advising the project steering group as a ‘critical friend’.
Smooth production process
The project is nearing completion, with the team ready to wrap the work up by Christmas. This Thursday was a pick & mix day of training, ad hoc support and some filming on the side.
Steve kicked the day off with an informal talk about Augmented Reality in teaching and learning. Then Steve talked all things WordPress with some of the team while Chris was helping solve problems they’d stumbled upon in their video production.
My role was to make sure we left with enough material for a video about the project. So I focused first on the cutaways, shoving the camera in people’s faces during talks and support sessions and then went on to set up a little filming corner for the interviews.
The day’s film crew included Steve on audio, me behind the camera (and on lighting, i.e. holding the reflector) and Simon as the interviewer.
It was encouraging that our production process has been honed to a decent standard which meant we could get a lot in just a couple of hours without interfering too much into people’s working days. We drove back with all the memory cards full.
Next, editing.