Associate Professor David LAST served for 30 years in the Canadian Army and now teaches at the Royal Military College of Canada. He is the Secretary of the International Society of Military Sciences and a graduate of the NATO DEEP e-Instructor program.
Question 1. What are some of the specific areas within e-instruction or online teaching that you are particularly passionate about or interested in pursuing further?
I am passionate about making traditional education more accessible to those whose circumstances do not allow them to attend classes regularly. This includes anyone who is working or deployed in remote areas with poor connections and even people who are attending an institution of higher military education but who may be called away for operational reasons. Pursuing this further means finding solutions to practical problems of accessibility and use of time. Beyond making content available, we need to find better ways to engage students and allow them to participate fully. We have to think carefully about specific learning objectives. Let me give you an example. I teach a course in comparative politics, which requires officer cadets to develop critical skills in case selection and organisation. In class, we walk through examples on a whiteboard before they develop their own research proposals. But I often have cadets who miss classes for other duties, and I have to replicate this experience for them. Recording the class is often unsatisfactory, but it’s always a challenge finding the time to prepare a quality video, and each year is a little different, so re-using class recordings doesn’t work well either. In the end, it usually just means finding more time.
Question 2. What challenges should be taken into consideration during the creation of a multimedia product?
The previous example brings me to the three big challenges for multimedia products in a military university setting. The first challenge is to make the right choices even before you start. Which parts of a course lend themselves to specialised media productions, and who can help? I try to pick parts of the course that I know are going to be used more than once in order to justify the time. The second challenge is teamwork. We can justify resources for development if more instructors are using the same products. This means careful negotiation with colleagues who are teaching related courses. But at the same time, we don’t want to over-use resources. Student officers will quickly switch off if they see the same video two or three times. The third challenge is finding the time to get it right. In the NATO DEEP e-Instructor course, we learned how to develop multimedia videos, which takes a lot of time to do properly. In my experience, it takes two hours to edit five minutes of video.
Question 3. What are some effective strategies for managing multimedia creation?
It’s tempting to try to get each section perfect, but as we say, “the best is the enemy of the good” and there is never enough time for perfection. I am a clumsy editor, so for me it is much easier to redo a short video than to try to edit it. On the other hand, it may be easier to use a video with small imperfections rather than to redo or edit it. So, my default is to use an imperfect product available immediately rather than wait until I have time to edit and improve it. This means that it is best to keep all products short and simple because it is easier to replace a short and simple video than a long and complex one. Some of the more complex tools we were shown on the e-instructors course need production teams, and I don’t think they are so suitable for single-instructor courses.
Question 4. What online resources or tools would you recommend for online learners to create their own projects and to enhance their skills?
I am amazed at what my students can do with their smart-phones, and I have never been disappointed when I have asked them to produce videos or podcasts to present their materials asynchronously. I recommend what I understand, which is Apple products, including iMovie, Garageband, and voice memos. But most of my learners are well beyond those simple tools. One area I’m experimenting with now is asking learners to use AI tools to ask research questions, which we then work through first with Google Scholar and then with library search engines. I know a lot of instructors warn them not to use AI to avoid plagiarism. I insist that learners use a template to acknowledge the use of AI in all its forms.
The interview was conducted by the NATO DEEP eAcademy team.