From Script to Screen: Practice-based Guidelines for Designing and Producing Video Lectures in Higher Education

This paper examines the design and production of video lectures in higher education as an integrated educational process rather than a set of isolated technical tasks. It addresses the gap between research on multimedia learning, instructor presence, accessibility and online course design and the practical conditions under which video lectures are developed in blended and digitally mediated university settings, using as a case study the experiences from the EDUNEXT Project, which involves 40 Italian universities that are sharing working processes and definition of professional roles in the production of online courses. Drawing on the relevant literature, the paper identifies a set of pedagogical, communicative, technical and accessibility-related criteria and translates them into a structured articulation of the production process, from didactic analysis and scripting to recording, post-production, publication and review. The paper offers a practiced-based contribution for supporting more coherent, inclusive and pedagogically grounded approaches to video-based teaching in higher education.