What's the role of video in e-learning?

Video is beginning to play a big role in education.  Or is it?

The Open University in the UK began to use TV programmes late at night to reach thousands of distant-learners from the early 1970s onwards.  Primary and secondary schools have dabbled with pre-recorded programmes and watching TV for a few decades too.

The cost of video equipment (and skills to edit the recordings) have usually been out of the hands of most educators, however, until recently.  But now, with cheap video cameras, open-source editing software and free tutorials on YouTube, everyone can create a video to use in the classroom or lecture theatre.  

But they still don't.  Most educators, or lecturers, or teachers, will use something that others have made.  The process is still too long, too convoluted.

Even making something decent from PowerPoint (and putting it through Articulate) is beyond the skills of  most educators... and they need the imagination as well as the time to put the learning objects together.

But as I explore video-conferencing with a view to potentially using it in the classroom, for example when the next ash cloud means people can't travel, I learn that high-schools and sixth-form colleges have already been using video-conferencing to teach diplomas across entire education areas, where there may only be one or two students per school who want to take that particular class.

And when you mix that with interactive white-boards and experiments with virtual worlds, it makes one wonder how quickly certain levels of education are leaping ahead of universities and other higher education establishments in terms of the technology used?  Do we need to wait for those youngsters to come through to universities and business schools before implementing the new technology, or are thirty-something and forty-plus executives willing to learn new tricks?

Perhaps one way to get them on board is to use fancy tricks they'll 'ooh' and 'aah' over.  For example, if you're studying internal medicine or engineering, why not have the teacher walk through the intestines, or pistons of a car, and point out the various areas directly?

The technology to do that used to be prohibitive, but now you can get your own green screen for virtually nothing... it's a little bit of training on the editing software that will be the bigger barrier.

So we educators don't need to try and do effects of the quality seen in the video below (which you really should watch. Honestly - only a few short minutes of your life - but you will go 'ooh' and 'aah') ... but why not walk through our graphs of economic collapse or our strategic human resource management models to combine the lecturer and the slides in one lovely package?

The biggest question I'm facing now is what we need from the video-conferencing side of it all.  What's more important?  To share documents or see the person?  Can we do both live with good quality, without having everyone sat at a $250,000 tele-presence unit?

And do we need to see the others? Are we not happier knowing that by telephone people can't see us in our pyjamas, or scratching ourselves or picking our noses (I believe some people do that)?