CHEM V101 Experiment Video Reference Library

The CHEM V104 videos

The V101 library grew out of an earlier project. In Fall 2024 Antonia Flores had a CHEM V104 student who is hearing-impaired and attended lab with a sign-language interpreter, and she asked whether captioned videos of each experiment could let the student preview the lab. Antonia performed and narrated each experiment; I filmed, edited and captioned them, with captions aligned by hand. By Summer 2025 the full V104 set was published on the Ventura College Chemistry YouTube channel and in Canvas, and the work was paid through a district stipend posted for the chemistry lab video project. (The full story is on the CHEM V104 Laboratory Demo Video Project page.)

Those were instructional videos: a narrated walk through each lab, meant to be watched before coming in.

The V101 recording run

After the V104 series was finished, I turned to CHEM V101, recording all twelve experiments on the regular semester schedule between January and April 2026. That took about fifteen hours of recording, then roughly eleven hours of editing and two hours of Canvas work. The output is 67 videos, 20 photographs, and 13 Canvas pages, published to the Ventura College Chemistry YouTube channel and embedded into the online lab manual on Canvas.

Close-up reference clips

For V101 I wanted something different from the V104 videos. Instead of narrated instruction, these are close-up reference clips: short, minimally edited, no audio, showing the detail a student cannot see from the back of the room. They sit inside the online lab manual next to the step they show, as a supplement to the instructor's own pre-lab talk. A student who wants to see exactly how a meniscus is read can scrub a short clip frame by frame without hunting for the moment inside a longer narrated video.

Making it a department resource

The V104 videos became a department resource through the stipend: paid work, published through YouTube and Canvas for any instructor to use. The V101 clips were made outside that arrangement.

To come under the same model, the V101 clips need closed captions added, because a stipend-funded library is held to the accessibility standard of the V104 set. That update is what I am preparing now, and I have asked the department how to open a stipend for it.

Next steps

The recording is done. The caption update comes next, once the stipend question is settled. I would like to build the same kind of library for CHEM V120B. The timing is not set.