By Susam Zvacek
Director of the Center for Learning Technologies

Last spring Michelle Kelley, associate professor of psychology, wasn't sure that her ideas were high-tech enough to warrant writing a proposal for a Faculty Innovator Grant. After all, she just wanted to produce a couple of videotapes for her developmental psychology classes. videotapes for her developmental psychology classes.

Fortunately, she went ahead and submitted a proposal that explained why these videotapes would be appropriate instructional tools for helping college students understand that children are not simply "miniature adults." The result of her proposal was funding to engage the university's video production team in this project.

Ultimately, the original plans were scaled back to reflect the constraints of budgets and time; Kelley and the producers focused their efforts on creating one professional-quality videotape on the topic of parenting skills.

She explains, "My rationale for this [proposal] was that there are well-recognized patterns or styles of parenting in the literature, but no good videotapes that illustrate these. Hopefully, when the students see the parenting styles modeled on video, the light bulb will go on and the 'ah ha' will be there."

Ideally, Kelley says, the video will enable her students to learn the basic concepts of parenting more quickly so that they can move ahead ". . . into the more advanced areas about complex relationships between parents and their kids."

Creating high-quality video presents challenges few of us realize - and those multiply exponentially when children are involved. Fortunately, Kelley worked closely with Jerry Harrell, video production manager for Academic Television Services, to focus her script and determine precisely how the concepts would be sequenced and presented.

Harrell commented, "Dr. Kelley went out of her way to be fully prepared. She made it not only easy to shoot, but communicated her ideas in terms of what was important. This kind of 'preproduction' is what can make or break a final result."

The final cut of her video will be completed soon and ready for its classroom premier this semester. Eventually, there may be other videos to follow, but for now she's happy to have had the opportunity to create this one.

"I was very pleased that there's a recognition of the value of this kind of technology in teaching and was delighted when it was chosen," she said. "I'm doing basic stuff that's not really high-tech, but I know it will be a quality product."