Videos Not the Magic Bullet for Online Teaching Catherine Strong Massey University More and more educators are required to design their courses to be delivered to fully on-line students. Many guidelines simply say online students love videos, so put everything into a video form. Catherine Strong has taught online journalism courses for six years and says it is a fallacy that students gravitate to video instructions. She explored what students actually used in their digital assignments, not what they SAID they preferred. e number of online courses and online degrees is exploding across the country. ere has been a steady increase over the past 15 years in courses, as well as the number of students enrolled, according to the most recent 2017 Allen & Seaman report. (Allen and Seamen, 2017; Online Learning Consortium, 2015) is growth of online courses makes economic sense, since it saves money on classrooms, and attracts students who want to combine studies with other ac- tivities, such as raising children, holding a job, living out of state. As an example, the University of Mas- sachusetts has just hired an executive to build up its online program at a starting salary of $403,000 with possible annual bonuses of $120,000. According to the Boston Globe, this salary will be funded from the online income, which was $100 million last year. (Fer- nandez, 2017) ese igures show the strong inancial incen- tive for universities to encourage educators to design courses to be delivered online. Designing online courses is challenging, and it is doubly challenging for those of us teaching multi-me- dia journalism skills. On one hand, we have accredita- tion bodies and industry wanting students with more practical digital skills, while on the other hand it is diicult to teach this to students scattered throughout the world with questionable access to equipment. One style of resource that is consistently lauded for online teaching is video instructions. A plethora of online websites and blogs tell teachers to use videos, and Google.com lists thousands of websites and blogs on “making videos for online courses.” But robust empirical research shows a diferent story, pointing out that they are not as helpful as many of the blogs assert, and that they do not always capture students’ attention. Studies show that many students do not open the videos at all (Kim, et al., 2014). A study in TJMC by Gil and Williams (2017) found that students watch only three minutes of a video on average, no matter what the length of the video. It appears the young generation love entertaining videos for their spare time, but it’s a diferent story for course instructional videos. I set out to discover what my fully online stu- dents actually used. A good case study is Massey’s Introduction to Journalism, a second-year basic skills online course. Besides using computer hardware and software, it includes using digital audio recording de- vices, microphones, smartphones, editing software, Keywords: OER (Online Educational Resources), Journalism Education, Media Education, Online Teaching. Teaching Journalism & Mass Communication A journal published by the AEJMC Small Programs Interest Group Vol. 8, no. 1 (2018), pp. 32-34 http://www.aejmc.us/spig/journal