By Allison Campbell-Jensen
Streaming video resources offer professors and students contemporary slices of media that can be incorporated into classes in a variety of ways.
Videos may be integrated into the online Canvas learning environment, for instance, or they can be offered as excerpts in classroom presentations. With the recent addition or expansion of six sets of streaming videos to the Libraries’ collection, there is plenty to explore.
These streaming videos are searchable, often have transcriptions, and can be made into clips, says Scott Spicer, Media Outreach Librarian. With students’ expectations that resources will be available anywhere at any time, streaming video can be a preferred way to present content even though they can be more expensive and complex to acquire than DVDs, says Sunshine Carter, Director, Collection Strategy & eResource Management.
Most importantly, faculty can use them as teaching aids, where the content is used to reinforce core concepts or as supplemental material that help students better understand complex topics.
Valuable content
Sociology professor Enid Logan values the PBS documentary series “Asian Americans.” There isn’t a lot of material on Asian Americans in her discipline and this series examines ethnic differences among Asians while putting their histories in context.
“It looks at the struggles of Filipinos in California and how they worked with some of the Mexican farmworkers during the 1960s protests,” she says. “And it looks at Japanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans who had much earlier histories of immigration. It also turns to some of the most recent immigrants, like the Hmong in the Twin Cities.”
Along with teaching about Asian Americans, Logan sees the series as empowering Asian American students studying Sociology, History, or American Studies, by removing a cloak of invisibility from them.
“It’s also important to the broader student body, including non-Asian students, to also locate Asian American histories within these longer narratives,” Logan says.
During the Vietnam War period, Asian American emerged as an identity but that is little known, she says.
“We are used to hearing these histories of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War but not so much about different Asian American population groups and the idea of Asian American identity — how that was forming at that time.”
Carter says that it can be difficult for libraries to obtain licenses for television programming, so having the PBS collection can be quite a benefit for instructors.
Close to hands-on for clinical education
Visualization of skills is important in clinical education, says Stephanie Delkoski, Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing. She has used previously available streaming videos about newborn and postpartum care in undergraduate courses. The students are able to review the videos right before they come in to do a clinical experience, which is helpful.
“We haven’t found anything better,” she says. Videos found on YouTube may not be medically based or reliable and may have sponsors. The videos from this nursing collection, however, are unbiased. In the past, the students have found videos that look old and are not aesthetically pleasing, but these new videos are more current.
Building the collections
“This is fabulous content,” Carter says. “It expands the number of films available to our campus for streaming, and provides high quality alternatives when a desired title is not available for streaming.”
With these acquisitions from Alexander Street, Spicer points out that more than 70,000 videos have been added to the previous 10,000 or so, creating an abundant resource. Academic Video Online (AVON), he adds, is fairly comprehensive. The Libraries purchased a three-year subscription to AVON; the others have been purchased in perpetuity.
With more instruction moving online during pandemic times, these media resources are especially valuable for instructors, Carter says. The potential is exciting.
Recent streaming video acquisitions
Recently acquired or expanded streaming video collections from Alexander Street include:
- Academic Video Online (AVON): 70,000+ videos on a range of topics including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more.
- Counseling and Therapy in Video: 2,400+ hours of footage from actual therapy sessions, training videos, and reenactments conducted by renowned counseling professionals. The University Libraries has access to the Classic Collection (volumes 1 and 2).
- Disability in the Modern World: 125+ hours of video on the growing disciplines of disability history and disability studies, and history, media, the arts, political science, education, and other areas where the contributions of the disability community are often overlooked.
- Ethnographic Video Online: Added part four, Festivals and Archives; contains ethnographic films, documentaries, select feature films, and previously unpublished fieldwork on the study of human culture, behavior and society around the world.
- Nursing Education in Video: Third Edition: Full videos, with searchable, synchronized transcripts, which can easily be embedded into online courses. Topics covered include clinical skills, exam skills, procedures, communication (including cross-cultural communication), ethical issues, legal issues, and much more.
- PBS Video Collection: Fourth Edition: 1,200+ streaming videos from PBS, including documentaries and series on many topics, including art, science, history, business, and more.