Sophomore Slump: 2020 Vision

2020 Vision is going to be the most cliche thing of the year. That and the “roaring 20’s.” I want to share my vision for 2020, which is to inspire something in you.

My goals are not for everyone. I don’t know that I would even call these goals. I hope that I make progress in building my program. That’s it. I want to build my program. The plan is the key…

First things first. More kids in the door. 2019 was a tough year for me in terms of students. In raw numbers, I only taught less than 60 students in 2019. At this point, 2020 looks better. Building the new program has been hard on my teaching skills and my ego. I am used to having full classrooms and excited students. Last spring, I had a class of 2 who you could not get excited if you set them on fire. I have all intro classes next semester. I have 2 TV production classes, and 1 Intro to Digital Media (1st stop on Animation Pathway), and they are close to full. I don’t mind if they are full, but I know that I will lose a good many when I tell them they are going to have to write and do work… EVERY DAY! 

For the TV production classes, we are going to make a HUGE impact in 2020. I will have a class at the beginning of the day and at the end. The plan is to do two news shows a day. Each show will be 5 minutes in length, but each will have completely different goals and audiences. The morning show will be more traditional announcements, updates, and the like that will be pushed to the school via youtube and facebook (think older crowd…).

The afternoon show is going to be a huge risk and leap for me. First, we are going to shoot vertical. Everything will be shot to be posted vertical. We recently updated our Tricaster, and with Premium Access, we can change the aspect ratio 9:16. The plan is to push this content to Instagram, SnapChat, Tik Tok (yes tik tok), and really target our students. This show will be far less formal, but it will be very informative. I am approaching this show as an “email” to the students each day.

Ok… Let’s address the elephant in the room. Vertical video is not going away. It is not going to take the place of horizontal video and certainly has a place in the video production world. I am completely speculating as I have not done the research, but I bet than 75 to 85% of video content is now consumed on a mobile device. I have mentioned this numerous times to colleagues from around the country and get a ton of different responses. My thoughts… In order to ride a wave, you have to paddle out in front of it. While a wave dies out relatively quickly, I don’t foresee consuming video on mobile devices dying out any time soon.

Speaking of being in front of the wave… My Introduction to Digital Media classes are going to be focusing solely on producing social media content. This is my 4th time teaching this course, and to be honest, this is the first time that I have found the “why” for teaching it. I love teaching photography, videography, editing in all of the Adobe products, but I could not wrap my hands around a way to make it matter. I believe that for a student to really learn and retain knowledge, the students have to know that what they are doing is going to matter. Either personally or on a larger scale, what we teach has to matter for our students to want to learn it and retain it. Also, a big factor in my decision to go this way is that in my work with the University of Georgia’s Grady School of Journalism, I have noticed a ton of those students getting internships in digital media and social media content creation.

What am I going to be teaching… the students will learn everything from camera settings through animation in After Effects, including shooting and editing video. The goal is to have a class that will make relevant content for a variety of social media apps. We are going to spend the first-week learning and sharing about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, and even LinkedIn. I think this will give the students a well-rounded knowledge of the social media space as well as how to create the content that matters for each app. The hope is that they will jump on this and be over the top and want to shoot a ton of school events and edit in class, but that may take a while to build that culture.

As I look forward to 2020, I do what to share what I think we are going to see on the next trip around the sun….

NDI is going to explode in the education space. I think it has started to rumble, but I believe that as more teachers and system administrators see the power (and safety) related to technology, we are going to see a lot more people using it for a variety of things, including sports, news, and events.

Staying with the advanced technology, I think we may start to see some schools start to use REMI in the next year. REMI is remote integration. I believe that NDI is the first step in remote broadcasting, but some of the more advanced programs are going to take that to the next level. Between Teradek and LiveU, someone is going to find a way to do some really special stuff in this arena. REMI would allow you to have someone send video from anywhere with internet access back to a central control room. I recently experienced this a couple of months ago at the SunBelt Conference Cross Country Championships. The conference hired an engineer from Raycom to bring equipment along with 5 freelance photographers (1 with drone experience), and they shot at the event on the south side of Atlanta. The signals were sent to Indianapolis, where the director mixed it live. The director also had communication with the camera ops in the field…. This is coming. Be Ready!

Finally, I think the biggest thing we are going to see in our world is the continued explosion of video production programs across the country. As video production becomes the norm, I believe the demand for it at all schools is coming. Our jobs are no longer to make a Friday show for the students, but instead, our jobs are quickly becoming the mouthpiece for the students, schools, and stakeholders. My hope is that as these new programs take off, you, as an experienced teacher, will take a new teacher under your wing and show them how to get going and keep them in the industry. With this explosion of content, the expectations are higher, and new teachers are going to struggle to learn how not only to teach but how to teach people how to do something that may be second nature to them… or they may be learning video as they are teaching.

My 2020 vision is simple. Keep my eyes open for change and try to get out in front of the waves that are coming our way!