Micro-lectures: A Cure for Content Bloat
By These Lectures Are Gone in 60 Seconds
You’ve heard of mini-lectures. Now come micro-lectures. This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education espouses a daring idea: Cut a 60-minute lecture down to a 60-second chunk for online audiences. Think it can’t be done? Click here to read how some instructors are doing it. Go ahead, we dare you…
Here are some additional examples of what other people and organizations are doing to get messages across in a short amount of time:
Petcha Kutcha (pronounced pet-chach-ka; Japanese for “chatter”). The only rule: 20 slides, 20 seconds each = 6:40 minutes. It forces one to be concise.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGaCLWaZLI4&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NZOt6BkhUg&feature=related
http://meetingsnet.com/checklistshowto/more/meetings_minilectures_learning/index.html
A 90-second micro lecture example: http://chronicle.com/media/video/v55/i26/microlecture/
An example of a narrated Powerpoint presentation (3.5 mins): http://www.slideshare.net/ethos3/storytelling-101
A website devoted to short how-to videos. (cluttered, and you have to wait through a movie trailer, but it illustrates that you can convey good, *focused* material in 2 minutes. http://www.5min.com/Video/How-to-Plant-Small-Seeds-99747505
UNC-CH’s YouTube home. ( This one shows videos grouped under categories by groups or topics. We might consider having our own site.) Click on the “playlist” link to see the videos. http://www.youtube.com/user/UNCChapelHill
UNC-CH School of Medicine site. Click on the “Patient Stories” playlist. (We could do something like this based on local government lessons from the field, etc.)http://www.youtube.com/user/uncmedicine
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