ViLLA

The classroom videography manual we published in 2023 was about filming teaching. Music education has the same word in it — teaching — but it is a fundamentally different recording challenge. Sound is the subject matter. The lesson is often one person, in a practice room. And the feedback cycle the teacher needs to reach is mostly the one that happens when no camera is present. A reflection on what the manual missed, and a software prototype that tries to address part of it.

Three years after writing about why classroom video works, Charlotte Kramer, Kai Kaspar, and I wrote a manual on how to actually do it. The gap between interpreting study-specific evidence for video-based learning and producing usable footage turns out to be substantial. The manual is open access. Here is what is in it and why some of it surprised me to write.

ViLLA is an online portal of real classroom videos built for teacher education at the University of Cologne. The idea sounds straightforward. Getting there required filming actual lessons, building infrastructure, evaluating a quasi-experimental intervention, and later scaling the project. Some notes on how that went.