Posted by Janne Länsitie
Demonstration (or instruction) videos can be produced by teachers, students, industry professionals or by any individuals. There are plenty of online platforms that provide an opportunity for easy sharing of instructional videos that demonstrate a particular skill or competence.
Demonstration videos produced by a school or a teacher are probably linked to a specific skill or competence relevant to a study program. Teacher can perform a model that helps students to practice or perhaps give a sequence of instruction helping students to sequence their activities. This sort of videos can have somewhat low production value and are pretty easy to make. Perhaps teacher only needs to use screen capture tools or mobile device to record his or her own action.
Instruction videos provided by companies are usually there to help their customers to use the machines, materials or tools that are available at stores. These videos are really helpful in the context of formal education as well as informal learning.
Similar videos can be produced and published by individual persons as well. Youtube is full of these. The challenge is that the quality of these videos is very variable. Audio and image quality might make it quite hard to follow the instruction. You will find plenty of videos in English language but different language versions are still rare - until development in technology provide us automatic translations. This might not be that far away. Text translation works already quite well and automatic audio translation already has some good examples.
If a student can demonstrate their competence with a video it is a valid tool for workplace learning and distance education. Naturally, the quality of the video has to be good enough for the assessment. It has to be evident that the student is actually able to act according to the competence goals. If there is a large amount of video material available, it's quite challenging for a student to recognize his/her own competence. Students can't just give hours of unedited material to prove their skills - the video should be a constructed piece that has a clear purpose.
It's quite often adviced that this sort of videos should be quite short. From a couple of minutes up to ten minutes maximum. One video clip should be about one skill or competence. In educational context we can combine videos from different sources and sequence the teaching and learning activity around them.
Plenty of material is also hidden from us. They are only published on a closed platform or website or perhaps the foreign language results won't even pop up in your own search results. In some cases you really have to know what you are looking for - perhaps the video is produced by a local hardware store and not by a manufacturer of a particular tool. Or vice versa. Maybe the video is outdated. Or unreliable. Still - there's a huge amount of help and examples available that wasn't accessible before. There's certainly more than any of us know of.
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