Skills

In my world, "producing" means doing one or more of the following at any given point:

  • Content editing. Providing constructive criticism to instructors to help them find their voice.
  • Roleplaying as student. Switching on my "beginner's mind" to ensure instructors are speaking at the right level for the target audience.
  • Project managing. Simultaneously my least favorite yet most important job: making sure that requirements and deadlines are met. Yay for accountability!

A large proportion of the curriculum I've produced over the last 10 years has been video. As a result, I have a large bag of tricks I've developed over the years to help craft enaging and instructive video content:

  • Apple Keynote skills. A few years ago as I was creating some crazy animations with complex builds and effects I thought to myself "Huh, I guess I'm a Keynote expert now? Weird."
  • Video editing. Back in the day, I thought film/video was my calling, I even went to school for it! Although other editors do the day-to-day production, I'm still hands-on for my own courses, where I'm unabashedly a control freak. Screenflow is my weapon of choice, it's not as full featured as other timeline editors such as Premiere or FCP, but its unique screen recording features have saved my butt on more than one occasion.
  • Audio expertise. Capturing high quality audio is critical to a good online learning experience. Again, my film & video experience comes in useful here. For post-production clean up and sweetening, if I can't do it in Screenflow then I use Adobe Audition, an underrated and powerful tool. (It also helps that I once helped write a book on it).