One of the big barriers to getting on online course off the ground is my fear of making videos.
But this is the year of adventure, so I am just going to make them anyway.
This week, I did two things. I did a sweet, short, outdated course on Udemy called How to teach an online course. Made by an endearing man called Huw Collingworth, it doesn’t really teach you how to teach an online course. But it does take you through all the things you need to make decent quality videos. Equipment, software, backdrops, presentation skills – they’re all there, explained in really simple terms. It was lovely.
Then I enlisted my son’s help in figuring out what equipment we actually have, and spent a day (yes, most of a day) trying to make the bits of equipment that we do have talk to each other. Turns out some are on speaking terms, and some aren’t. End result: I will be using my phone and a lapel mic (joined by a splitter cable that I am buying) to film myself. And I will make screencasts with my trusty computer and a USB mic (I am also buying the mic).
So far, so good. Now I have to put my actual self on the line and talk to a camera. Not so good.
In one of those serendipitous events that happen when you set a ball rolling, in my inbox yesterday was a post entitled The Psychology of Camera Confidence by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She looks at the reasons why so many of us are afraid to be filmed. She says:
Our instinctive fear of being judged has served for millennia as a way to maintain social cohesiveness. In a very real way, being rejected by the group used to mean death. When you say something [in real life] yuur brain automatically analyzes the cues communicated through their facial expressions.
But the cold eye of the camera doesn’t do that – which causes anxiety.
Cunff has committed herself to 10 days of filming herself, and posting the video online. You can see the results here. She is wonderful!
So I am filming myself every day, starting yesterday. So far, I have immediately deleted the results. There are things I simply don’t like about the way I look (mostly, it’s my hair and my double chin), so I am just making the videos and looking at them. But once I have sorted out my hair, they are going to have to be shared. Fear or not.
Main picture: Cristina Zaragoza, Unsplash
