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Enhancing Courses with Video Interviews

Heloisa Siffert

Senior Instructional Support Specialist

Center for Support of Instruction

Published: January-February 2008

Category: » Online-pedagogy » Teaching-strategies

Video interviews can enhance learning process, engage students and provide real life experiences through experts' perspectives.

During the span of two years, a series of video interviews were developed for TMAN 636, Knowledge Management (KM). The instructor, Dr. Flavia Fonseca, capitalized on her personal contacts in the knowledge management field to arrange interviews with professionals in the area. Dr. Fonseca facilitated several interviews that took place at the interviewees' office location. Heloisa Siffert, a staff member from the Center for Support of Instruction (CSI), assisted with the recording, editing and publishing of interviews to Dr. Fonseca's classroom.

The key idea for conducting the video interviews was to provide students with concrete descriptions of various KM practitioners' experiences in order to complement class discussions and written case studies. The main advantage was to show what worked and what didn't in these KM implementations.

The World Bank case exemplifies this approach with two different facets being presented: Information Technology through the vision of the CIO (Chief Information Officer) and Knowledge Management through the view of its CKO (Chief Knowledge Officer).

Another important aspect of the interview series was to bring new KM topics that are currently in development. For example, Dr. Blair, the author of several books and studies on KM, was invited to talk about new approaches that are still being tested, such as Personal Knowledge Management. The video interview was used in combination with the author participation as a guest speaker in the classroom.

Mr. Kahan was invited to discuss some specific tools and methods that are particularly important to KM programs. In his interview, Mr. Kahan brought his views about development of Communities of Practice.

From the production aspect, the video interviews were low cost but had a high impact result. Each video was recorded, edited, transcribed and ultimately published as a webpage. The page served as a package for that respective interview, and included information about the speaker and relevant support references.

Students' feedback was extremely positive to all videos. Particularly successful was the video of the World Bank Case where different scenarios were represented with more than one interviewee. The students appreciated the fact that they could see the interviewees, which helped to break the text-based routine of the online classroom, as well as the ability to submit questions that were used to guide the interviews.

The lesson learned from this experience suggests that it was relatively easy to produce a project with a high impact on the course. However, close involvement from both the faculty and the CSI staff member was essential to the development of the multimedia objects.

The method is relatively simple to replicate for other courses such as foreign language, biotechnology, etc. The video object can easily evolve into a "learning object" by associating it to other web links and documents, which support a subject discussed in an interview. Video interviewing is ideal for enhancing educational experiences, particularly in those subjects where there are limited multimedia resources to supplement instruction.