Back near the middle of my grad school career, I started teaching courses as a sort of “super-TA”. I had found that my students were having trouble with a CMOS homework problem and a lot of them were coming into my office hours – so I figured it would be best to put up a supplementary video (and I think it worked pretty well!)
I started generating more and more videos to support my lectures, and have generally gotten good responses from students. For my online classes, that sort of content got rolled right into the regular lecture “pages”
I have always liked making videos, and over the summer of 2023 I decided to revamp my office and invest in video making equipment. I wasn’t exactly sure what my heading was – just that I wanted to experiment more with videos. Eventually this spawned into two projects – a weekly educational video, and a weekly podcast.
It never would have been possible if I didn’t figure out how to make a video creation setup that left me without the need to edit (or just minimal editing). 2 videos per week on top of my already packed schedule is a pretty aggressive goal, but I’ve found keeping up inertia to be an important part of the way I function.
This month I had my first “relative hit;” The Resistor that doesn’t Resist. It’s a video detailing 3 reasons why 0 ohm resistors exist and what they’re used for. I had actually planned on doing another topic that week (A Different Way of Synchronizing Electronics), but was unable to, and so I came up with an idea that would be quick to produce.
I was a little surprised that the video did as well as it did, and it gave me the first strong signal of how to put videos together. In my opinion the reason this video did so well was just the thumbnail and title.
I’m pretty proud that I was able to make a successful video that people enjoyed, and I hope that I can use the information gathered from that run to inform making other well received videos.
