Video is often the go-to for online teaching sometimes pretty unthinkingly as it’s the most obvious transposition of traditional in-person teaching...but don’t overlook text! 1/

Video can be time-consuming in many ways even when you have the best intentions...and from a learning perspective it’s a sequential medium that moves at the pace of the educator not the learner. 2/

Sure, you can pause, rewind, adjust speed etc but it’s fundamentally different to text. 3/

Also, often videos are thought of as a whole entity and aren’t always designed with segmentation in mind and with signals that distinguish different sections that help learners find and revisit particular points. 4/

When this is lacking it can also hinder the organisation of what’s being covered and increase cognitive load. There’s arguably much greater scope to experience transient information effect too. 5/

Obviously good video design can mitigate this but headings and other divisions/editing and formatting can achieve that pretty easily via text. 6/

Supplementing text with relevant images, figures and graphics, if combined properly, can enhance learning too and you’re making use of two aspects of working memory (verbal and visual) which is very limited and needs to be managed carefully. 7/

So my overall message is don’t overlook text - if you’re moving to online teaching, ask yourself and think, what aspect of that lecture might be best suited to text. Or conversely, why does this need to be taught/explained via video? 8/

Don’t digitise the status quo, or be seduced by particular media for the sake of it - design and design for learning 9/