Creating Content for FYC
When it was clear that the nightmarish hellscape of the COVID-19 pandemic was settling in for good and classes moved online, I started dabbling in content creation as resources for my classes, particularly focusing on video creation. Since I was hardly leaving my house, I figured I should try and emerge from lockdown with some kind of skillset to show for it, and I don’t have the patience to hop aboard the bread-baking train.
So I turned my focus toward YouTube. There are a lot of great resources out there for teaching already, but sometimes I was looking for something specific. Since I’m a rhetoric scholar, the first year composition classes I teach tend toward building a solid foundation in rhetorical analysis, especially of visual texts. I kept finding materials that had great stuff here and there, but it was often either dated, suffered from amateur production quality, or was just too long. (In pandemic times, it seems we all have the attention span of a squirrel.)
Armed with only a well-developed design aesthetic, an educationally discounted subscription to Adobe CS, and a healthy dose of stubbornness, I started creating videos that covered a singular concept. The goal was that they would be flexible enough to use for several classes I teach. I had a few priorities; I was aiming for visual appeal, short run time, and only one main idea. In the past I’ve taught online and created lecture videos for specific classes, but I wanted to create some videos that I could return to each semester to give students an understanding of the concepts we routinely cover in FYC I and FYC II.
My channel artwork.
I’ve reached a point where I feel okay about them, but more importantly, I learn a little more each time, and I think each subsequent video gets a little better.
And so, I thought I would share my most recent video on visual rhetoric:
