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Stan Skrabut: Welcome back. Thanks ever so much for taking time to listen to this podcast. I know you could be doing other things, perhaps you are, but you’re still hanging out with me and I really appreciate it. I really, really appreciate it more even this week because this was a huge week, in terms of this podcast. We just crossed another huge milestone. A couple days ago, we crossed the 10,000 download mark, that is absolutely huge. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It took two years to get the first 5,000, then this last year, we crossed 10,000. I can’t wait to see what this upcoming year is going to be. Thank you.
This week, we are going to talk about repurposing content to provide instructional alternatives for your students. In a way, this was inspired by Rick Mulready’s podcast episode called, 16 Ways to Repurpose One Piece of Content and it comes from the Art of Online Business podcast. I listen to his podcasts on a regular basis, I like what Rick Mulready has to share. I’ve also included that episode in the show notes, I encourage you to go check it out because it may just generate other ideas, but it gives you the idea of how you can take one piece of content, start stretching it and creating all this alternative content. This is very much in line with my ideas of working out loud. This podcast has been pretty much part of that idea of working out loud, it has been my learning journey and I’m just sharing it with you.
Let’s look at this topic just a little more. In Rick Mulready’s podcast episode, he talked about taking one piece of core content and reusing it 15 other ways. Well, I’m going to talk about a similar strategy, but I’m probably not going to go into 15 different ways of doing it. Here’s the premise of this. The first thing you need to do is create a piece of core content. I am going to recommend that you create a video. There are lots of ways that you can go ahead and create a video. You can use tools like Camtasia to just build your video, you can use tools like Zoom, where you record a presentation or Teams, you can also use another tool that we’re using right now called Echo360, and they have a way to capture video.
That’s where I would start.
The reason I say start there because it opens up all kinds of possibilities. It makes it a lot easier to create all this other content that I’m going to talk about. When you do create this video, I recommend this strategy called Thin-slicing. You want to break your content into bite-sized chunks that focus on one objective. The reason is you can always build bigger content or connecting videos together or if you were going to create a blog post from this content later, you can take a variety of this content, of these chunks and chunk it together to make bigger units. It just makes it more flexible, that you can take these items that just focus on one content and share them with a lot more ease. I recommend just Thin-slicing or just focusing on one piece of content.
Here we have a video, which is your core content. With that video, you’ve created that video, now you should upload that video to a streaming service, like YouTube, Echo360, Vimeo, one of those services, and you can then share it with your students by embedding it in your LMS or you just give them a link, and they can go and check out your content. Students can now consume the content as either a video or audio. The reason I say also, they can consume it as audio, is I’ve actually seen folks play a video while they’re driving, but not have the video shown. They’re just listening to the content and go through a series of videos. They have right now, two different options, so that they can see it as a video or an audio.
We have that core content, now I want you to take that core content and convert your video into audio. If you recorded your video with Zoom, Zoom automatically will capture an audio copy of your file, so you can download that particular file. If you’re using something like Camtasia, you can export the file as an audio file. Now, your students have two ways to consume your content. This is really useful to your students if they want to listen to your presentation, lecture or listen to your content when they’re out for a walk or maybe when they’re commuting, that they have an opportunity just to kick back and still consume the content that you want to share in your class.
Now we have two different ways, we have a video and we have an audio. We have options. In your Learning management system, you can make both options available. It takes a little bit more, that you have to upload it, but students now have two options. A great place to start. Now that we have this audio content, what I want you to do is take that audio file and convert it into a transcript using a program like Otter.ai. Once you have this transcript, now your students can read your presentation. For some students, this can be a preferred way of doing it, but it also opens up all kinds of doors for you, once you have this printed out. Now we have three ways that your students can consume your content. They have options. Once again, I recommend that you upload this to your learning management system or you can use it in other materials.
If you use a program like Otter.ai and you capture this file, I do recommend that you go clean it up, because Otter.ai in my experience, will give you one big blob of text, which can be hard to read. You may have to put in some paragraph break, things like that, but it does give you a very clean, natural transcription. It is word-for-word for what you said on the video. I use Otter.ai to create transcripts of this podcast. I have switched from GoTranscript, which was a wonderful service, nothing knocking it, but Otter.ai get to turn around much quicker for me. It also comes in at a better price. It’s a subscription model, but considering that I do a transcript for each of my podcast episodes, I’ll end up saving money because of it. I’m willing to take the inconvenience that I have to break up my own paragraphs. Both services have been great.
Now you have three different ways. What I recommend after this is now, you can start putting it to use. As I mentioned, uploading this content into a learning management system, maybe creating content pages, what you can do is start having a combination of your videos and pulling selected text from your transcript, you can use that. If you’re walking them through steps, this is a quick way to break out those steps and have it as part of that page. You’re basically creating rich content pages to support the learning. You can also take this transcript and use selected pieces to craft handouts.
Next week, we’re going to talk about handouts in a lot more depth. You’ve probably seen those fill-in-the-blank handouts. Well, because you have a transcript, you already have the phrasing and the content where you can use that to build handouts that students can use, while they’re watching the videos to get the main points that you want to talk about. If you’ve got some specific key notes you want them to capture, now you can more easily create that because you have a transcript, these things are in your own words, it’s going to be very reflective of what’s in that video.
Another thing that you can do is you can also take quotes out of your transcript and maybe snippets from the videos and embed them in email messages or putting them in announcements, where essentially, you can create call to actions for students to go out and watch the longer segments of those videos. You can create your own advertising or highlight certain things that you want to emphasize. Over time, you’re collecting this material, you can start building your own OER content, this open education resources. Because you have all these different pieces at your disposal, you can actually craft your own book, for example, something that you want students to use.
I found that it’s a lot easier to get a jumpstart on creating content when I create an audio track and convert it to a transcript right away. For example, a week ago, seven days ago, I started NaNoWriMo. I talked about this before I even started it, it is the National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. This year, I am dictating my book or as I should say, I’m dictating multiple books. I’m doing two different projects at this time. During my lunch, I knock out one or two audio files and I get the transcripts through Otter.ai. In the span of 40 minutes, I have my word count completed and I just moving on. It’s been tremendously painless. Between the two projects, seven days later, I have captured over 31,000 words. I am ahead of pace for both projects. This is equivalent to 62 pages of material, almost nine pages per day. So simple, so easy. That is a way that I’m converting, reusing content. Starting with an audio file, moving into a tech file.
My other spin on this content, actually is with this podcast. I have been putting this concept of reuse already into practice. My core content is this podcast, and as of this episode, I have 142 episodes, which each episode I have exported a transcript, and each transcript is about six pages of material. In all, this is 850 pages of content that I have, that I can reshape into another project.
For example, I expect to turn all this work into a book one day, but in the meantime, I am currently working on turning the audio files into video recordings that I can upload to YouTube and share with my faculty. Using the transcripts, I’m building out slides, and then I will marry the audio that I’ve already gotten from the podcast with those slides, create videos, and I’ll post those videos on YouTube and take the slide presentations, put them into SlideShare and point individuals to both the podcasts, the YouTube videos and SlideShare, so they can easily find this content. This is an easy way to get ahead and to go and create novel content.
If you had written content first, why not create an audio file from that content and stretch it, then maybe you can take that audio file that you created reading your content, match it up with some slides, and turn it into a video. Lots of different ways that you can look at this, but it helps you move ahead a lot quicker, rather than thinking, “Oh, I’ve got to create something unique from scratch every time that you do it.” You don’t have to, you can reuse and repurpose content.
I encourage you to develop some core content, like videos to share with your students and once you do that, increase the options by producing alternatives to the original material. From there, you can start finding other ways to share your materials in unique ways. That is a little bit about this idea of repurposing content. I hope you go out and check it out. Speaking of checking things out, here’s a quick plug from my book, Read to Succeed.