Teaching Tip: Let students stream your lessons in their spare time

This tip is based on feedback from 338 students across four Los Angeles college campuses.

Record audio lessons for streaming. While video lectures are a wonderful way to humanize your course, consider also including a variety of audio-only lessons (with identical transcripts for accessibility), then upload them to a streaming service outside of the Canvas platform (I recommend SoundCloud — most students already have it on their phones).

When students can stream your lessons as audio, they can squeeze the material in when they are driving, at the gym, doing dishes, or waiting in line at the store. To really help your students, record yourself reading assigned articles or the textbook with your commentary to help advance their reading comprehension and upload these recordings to the same streaming service. Whenever possible, the best practice is to keep each recording 7 minutes long (or shorter) in order to give students an opportunity to focus on small bites of information.

This tip is part of a series, please also check out:

· Augment your in-person classes with online learning platforms

· Let your students text you

· Flip your classroom

· Transform your exams/quizzes into review tools

· Integrate gaming apps for review

· Build a meaningful task list

· Use discussion boards for major assignments

For the entire work, please see my article, “The Moral Obligation To Make Classes ‘Easy’.”