Editing takes the biggest bulk of most instructor’s time. Some instructors are lucky to have video editors who can work with them/for them, but not all of us are so lucky! I do one hundred percent of my own editing and finding ways to streamline that process can save me the most time.
First of all, I create a theme or template video for my course I am working on. This theme will have a standard look for a lower third, banners or an intro screen. These graphics look consistent or have a branded theme.
I start each lesson with this template, so I already have the first few seconds set up in my editing software, same for the outro, music and fonts. This saves me a ton of time as I do not have to set it up each time, I start a new lesson as there can sometimes be 60+ lectures.
I also film in one day. I can film up to four hours of screen recording content in one afternoon. This way I can record it all and save the editing for one session. This also helps to cut down on editing time and streamline my process, so I am not going from filming to editing too often and shifting gears too frequently.
I also plan ahead. I open up a google doc with my course outline and I write out the title of each lesson. If I need to write a script ahead of time, I will do all this at once.
There is a theme here of sitting down to do one task before moving onto another. As instructors we can get excited about teaching that sometimes we rush to film before we really planned out the outline to our course, and “play it by ear”. I found that to be more time consuming in the end as I had to go back and refilm things I have said because I decided to change up the course after filming the first few lessons.
What are some things that you've done to create a course in less time?