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Making of the #etmooc Lipdub

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I’ve been busy with #etmooc, a MOOC focused on educational technology & media. We’re nearing the (official) end of our first topic, Connected Learning, and late last night, we published a crowdsourced, #etmooc lipdub project. I feel that the video accurately captures the energy and personalities of #etmooc participants, and the spirit of sharing and connecting that has dominated this experience. Take a look.

Several people wanted to me to share the process of creating this lipdub, so I am detailing the steps in this post. The inspiration for this video came from the project Dean Shareski crowdsourced and edited for my 40th birthday. He’s previously shared his process which is similar to what we ended up doing.

So here are the steps:

  1. After getting some support for the idea of a lipdub project, I created a Google Form which collected nominations for the song we would eventually choose. I also gathered nominations directly in our #etmooc Google+ Community and via Twitter.
  2. I took the top 10 most nominated songs and added them to a PollEverywhere poll. It was a close race, and you can see the final results here.
  3. I created an editable Google Doc (see it here) that included a background to the project, song lyrics (found easily via Google), and instructions for submitting video. As you can see in the document, people volunteered for a specific line in the song and were asked to create and upload a video.
  4. Video was uploaded to my Dropbox account by using a connecting service called DropItToMe. This latter service allowed participants to upload video to a specific folder in my Dropbox account without me having to explicitly share that folder with every single person. As well, people couldn’t see, edit, or delete the videos of others,  so this made this project potentially more manageable. DropItToMe worked really well, and also has great application for other classroom projects.
  5. For people using mobile devices, DropItToMe wouldn’t have been as convenient. Instead, I specified an email account where files could be sent. If you notice, the email address was couros+etmooc@gmail.com. This is actually an alias address based on my real, couros@gmail.com account. If you have a Gmail email address you can add +’anything’ to the username to create an email alias – this makes it easy to create specific filters for special projects, to sort email as it comes in.
  6. It is important to note that I specified a naming convention for files. I had people include name, geographic location, and song line #. This made these videos fairly easy to manage and reference.
  7. Once the videos had all been uploaded, I shared my Dropbox folder with @stumpteacher who agreed to do the actual video editing – that was the hard work!
  8. After a few drafts, the final copy was uploaded to Youtube. Like magic! Kinda.

There were a few minor things that would have made things easier.

  1. The naming convention that I chose had the line # at the end, instead of at the beginning. Had I asked for the line # at the beginning, it would have made it easier to sort these videos in numerical order in Dropbox.
  2. I  should have asked for slightly longer clips so that there would have been the possibility of more overlap. A few clips ended up being quite short.
  3. Perhaps, I should have asked for a standard aspect ratio from participants – we had a mix of 4:3 and 16:9 – as well as a minimum resolution (480p or better?). Yet, in some ways, I feel that the mix may have actually added to the overall feel of this video.
  4. Perhaps I should have shared this PSA on Vertical Video Syndrome (VVS). Yet, again, the mix may have added to the overall feel. I’m really not sure.

That may be it. Thanks to everyone for being part of this project, and special thanks to Josh for his tireless editing and attention to detail. It’s truly a project that makes my heart warm – that helps to represent the human connection in these learning networks – the joy, the fun, the passion, the creativity. And, as @cogdog tweeted: