A Time-Optimized Content Creation Workflow for Remote Teaching

Abstract

We describe our workflow to create an engaging remote learning experience for a university course, while minimizing the post-production time of the educators. We make use of ubiquitous and commonly free services and platforms, so that our workflow is inclusive for all educators and provides polished experiences for students. Our learning materials provide for each lecture: 1) a recorded video, uploaded on YouTube, with exact slide timestamp indices, which enables an enhanced navigation UI; and 2) a high-quality flow-text automated transcript of the narration with proper punctuation and capitalization, improved with a student participation workflow on GitHub. All these results could be created by hand in a time consuming and costly way. However, this would generally exceed the time available for creating course materials. Our main contribution is to automate the transformation and post-production between raw narrated slides and our published materials with a custom toolchain. Furthermore, we describe our complete workflow: from content creation to transformation and distribution. Our students gave us overwhelmingly positive feedback and especially liked our use of ubiquitous platforms. The most used feature was YouTube's chapter UI enabled through our automatically generated timestamps. The majority of students, who started using the transcripts, continued to do so. Every single transcript was corrected by students, with an average word-change of 6%. We conclude with the positive feedback that our enhanced content formats are much appreciated and utilized. Important for educators is how our low overhead production workflow was sustainable throughout a busy semester.