on campus campusreview. com. au
Quite the visual
Digital media expert says video should play a more central role in today’ s classrooms.
Laurie Burruss interviewed by Antonia Maiolo
Multimodal strategies are the future of teaching and learning within universities, and video is one of the most valuable educational tools, bringing creative, collaborative and inclusive learning practices to the classroom, an education expert based in the US argues.
Senior director of education at lynda. com, Laurie Burruss, who also serves as the director of digital media at Pasadena City College, where she has been design professor for the past 15 years, says universities need to include learning practices that are relevant to the real world.
Burruss spoke at a recent education conference in Brisbane about what makes video such a great tool for learning, how teaching and learning techniques are changing with this type of technology and how she uses video to supplement learning in her classroom.
“ I was trying to make a call to the educators in the room … to think how we are going to teach our students to be multimodal literate so they can start solving problems for targeted audiences,” Burruss says.“ We [ can’ t ] simply limit [ learning ] to text, which is what universities and schools are primarily known for … this isn’ t the way we are working in the real world,” she explains.
Campus Review spoke with Burruss from the conference to find out why it’ s important to empower students with multimodal learning.
CR: You spoke at EduTech about how to use video in the classroom. Can you just talk us through the main message?
LB: In the last 10 years, we’ ve all tried to ramp up to make sure technology was accessible in our education systems. Meaning: do you have a laptop, do you have a Smart classroom …?
[ At the conference, I was ] making a call to the educators in the room to think now about video and learning. How are we going to teach our students to be multimodal literate, so that they can start solving problems for targeted audiences that will use a lot of form factors?
These form factors might be video, it
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