Recording a course module in one sitting

A course module is recordable in one sitting if you decide three things before you turn anything on: how long it runs, what appears on screen beside you, and what the person watching is meant to be able to do afterwards. Most of the afternoons that disappear are lost to deciding those things while recording, which is the most expensive place to decide anything.

This is written for the person making the course alone. No camera operator, no editor waiting downstream, and a teaching job that was already full before the recording was added to it.

Decide the length before you write

The instinct is to record the lesson you already teach, which is fifty minutes because that is how long a room is booked for. A room is booked for fifty minutes for reasons that have nothing to do with attention.

Work in pieces of eight to twelve minutes, each one answering a single question you could write on a line. A learner can find the piece they need, rewatch it without hunting, and finish something in a gap between other things. You get a bigger benefit: when one part is wrong next year, you re-record eleven minutes instead of the whole lesson.

Write the question first, then the script, then check the running time before you record a second of it. If it is twenty minutes, you have two modules and you found out for free.

Work out what belongs on the screen

Most modules need three surfaces and the mistake is to use one for everything.

• Slides carry the things you prepared. Definitions, the diagram you drew properly, the summary at the end.
• A board carries the things that only make sense in motion. Working through the problem, annotating the diagram, the arrow you draw between two ideas as you connect them.
• Your face carries everything else, and it is why the video exists at all rather than a document.

Teaching entirely off slides is what makes recorded lectures feel like a document being read to you. Teaching entirely to camera loses everyone the moment the idea needs a picture. The good version moves between them, and the move itself does teaching work: the deck says here is the definition, the board says here is what happens when we use it.

The working out is the lesson

A finished diagram tells a learner what the answer looks like. Watching it get built tells them how to build one, and those are different lessons. This is the part a polished slide deck quietly removes, and it is usually the part students say they needed.

So leave room to be unpolished. Draw the axes while you explain why they are those axes. Make the substitution on screen rather than revealing it done. Circle the term that everyone gets wrong at the moment you say it is the term everyone gets wrong.

There is a practical bonus here that is easy to miss. If the board you drew on saves as a PDF alongside the video, the working out becomes the handout, and you did not make a handout. That is covered on its own in the whiteboard that leaves with a handout.

Recording it without an afternoon disappearing

Set the room once

Light coming from in front of you, ideally a window you face. Microphone close, because a few inches from your mouth beats any amount of processing afterwards. Camera at eye height, which for a laptop means putting it on books. Do this once and stop thinking about it.

Read rather than remember

You know this material well enough to teach it live, so the temptation is to talk it through unscripted. Unscripted is where the twelve-minute module becomes twenty-six, with three false starts and a tangent you will have to cut. Write it, then read it at the lens, keeping pace with you rather than with a timer. The practical guide to reading a script while looking at the camera covers how to do that without sounding like it.

Keep going through the small mistakes

Saying a word twice, losing a thread and picking it up, a pause that runs a beat long. All of that reads as a person teaching. Stopping to fix it costs the take and buys a flatter one.

Record the pieces back to back

Your voice, the light and the room stay consistent inside one sitting and drift between them. Four modules in an afternoon sound like a course. Four modules across four weeks sound like four different people.

What you should have at the end

A video file per module, and a PDF of whatever ended up on the board. Both ready to hand to whoever asked for them, without an export queue, a watermark or an editor to relearn.

That is the shape LensFloat is built around. Script at the lens, deck and board on the same stage, recording as you go, and both files waiting when you stop. If the recurring problem is that the take keeps collapsing before you reach the end, start with why the sixth take is rarely better than the first instead.