As of August 2020 due to the on-going Covid-19 Pandemic, this web site will start presenting suggestions and draft protocols for the consideration of K-12 and Higher Education departments and instructors in California and in other interested U.S. states. The suggestions and protocols will ask educators to consider following include if and how to start recording their typically "lecture and demonstration" classroom presentations, now to occur from instructor home-offices. But the suggestions and protocols will also eventually include instructions about how to properly produce and eventually very well produce their 'remote learning' digital materials and eventually 'enhanced' lecture demonstrations as more 'engaging' distance learning.
In the short term of the next 6-18 months professional videographers can be recruited to visit individual sheltering-at-home instructors. Once "on location" each can help the instructor to properly and better "mic", "light" and "shoot" (with 1 or 2 cameras) the typical "lecture demonstration" presentations of those individual instructors while they are online with their remote students. Possibly some videographers with digital software experience can also help those instructors 'digitize' more of their on-paper instructional materials which each typically would have used in their respective B&M (brick and mortar, in-the-classroom) instruction.
In addition there will be suggestions on this web site to be sketched and outlined at first then frequently refined with more and more practical details using feedback. The feedback will be acquired from both instructors and educational institutions and include instructo and student subjective experiences, but also more quantitatively assessed presentation qualities such as how to use the video recordings of the individual instructors' online class presentations more effectively. This collected data will help planners to create, among other qualities, 'better produced' and scripted presentations. The latter could then be performed either by those instructors who may have practiced presenting a 'better' performance of their lectures and/or presentations by "actors" and "voice-over" narrators of parts of the lectures and demonstrations.
Other future enhancements to the "lecture demonstrations", if that mode persists in online learning, might involve re-presentations done by actors or by the best performers in the faculty. If animators can be recruited perhaps they can create animations that create more realistic micro-scopic or macro-scopic versions of the demonstration not practical or possible to show in a class room or online.
Some animations and/or actor performances might be "funny" as well, made funny by joke writers and story-board makers who take the previously-recorded raw videos and verbatim transcripts of a lecture and add 'funny' twists to the presentation that make the presentation more memorable because there are now 2+ ways for each student to remember the same vocabulary, concepts, and principles to be learned. And in the more distant future these mulitmeida materials can be further re-purposed to include student audience members' tasteful reproductions of their typical cultural experiences, to be used if their individual of peer group background and age levels make such individualized course and lesson content appropriate and more effective.
If, how and when those materials and enhanced presentations and learning materials are determined to be educationally more efficient and effective are "ways and means" yet to be determined then refined. But they all most likely will involve and be based upon existing "distance learning" academic research done at first by US universities, then by universities in some European countries, and so on; some notable samples of which will be listed on this web site.
