CHEM V104 Laboratory Demo Video Project

Background and purpose

CHEM V104 combines general and organic chemistry at a faster pace than the introductory sequence, and many students meet a chemistry lab for the first time in it. The course was numbered V30L when this was made.

I had wanted to build a video archive of the lab sequence, but how it would be used was still open. I had worked with video before I came to the college, and in the summer of 2024 Antonia Flores and I had finished the lab safety video series together.

In Fall 2024 one of Antonia's V104 sections included a student who is hearing-impaired and attended with a sign-language interpreter. Live lab demonstrations move quickly and happen over background noise, and the interpreter found it hard to translate every step in real time. Antonia suggested that the student preview each experiment on video before the session. That case settled how the archive would be used: as a shared teaching resource, built to be accessible and organized so that other instructors could use it in their own sections.

Production

Antonia set the schedule, two days after she raised the idea. It ran one video a week, each recorded the week before that lab met, in the room the lab is taught in. Experiment 5 was left out because it covers nomenclature and Lewis structures and has no bench work to record, and the experiments V104 shares with the introductory lab were marked so we could tell which videos would be reused. The schedule followed the course, so the person teaching the course wrote it.

From there the work divided along the same line. Antonia decided what a video needed to show, prepared the setups and reagents, made the procedure slides, and checked every cut for procedural and terminological accuracy. I ran the camera, the edit, the captions, and the distribution. Where I had something to add it was usually about what the camera could carry: which reactions to record for an experiment students rarely get to watch closely, or putting a thermometer in the shot so a temperature change is visible rather than narrated.

Antonia's notes were exact. She would give a caption for a clip second by second, or ask for one segment to be moved behind another, and at first she was sending them as screenshots pasted into email, which meant I had to match her picture back to a point in the timeline. Since the rough cuts were already uploaded for her to watch, I asked her to leave the notes as comments on the videos themselves, where every comment carries the timestamp it was written at. The review moved there and stayed there. Reshoots were requested the same way, and one video was added at the end of the run because she wanted the volumetric pipette handled on its own.

The result was 41 videos, captioned, delivered as standalone tutorials, so a single technique can be assigned on its own.

Use and reach

By Summer 2025 the full set was complete and published in three places: an unlisted playlist on the Ventura College Chemistry YouTube channel, uploads to Canvas Studio linked directly in course modules for both lecture and lab sections, and a shared folder on the department Canvas page so other faculty could embed or download. Unlisted means the videos are open to anyone given the link, which is everyone who uses them, without turning up in search. I created the channel for the department and gave Antonia admin access to it.

The videos were placed where a student would meet them before the lab, as the original request asked.

Because the files were captioned, clearly labeled, and modular, any section could use them without reformatting.

Reflection

The filming ran on the schedule set at the start. The dates in that first timeline are the dates we shot on, week after week, through a full teaching term, and the pace was light enough that neither Antonia nor I was carrying it on top of everything else. The part that ran long was the paperwork: the videos were finished and in use well before the stipend they were done under was written and posted, and the agreement for the work was still being routed a year after the last video went up.

The project also gave me a use for something I had set aside. I am not trained in media, but I have had a lot of chances to work on it, for a friend's media company and at my church, and none of it had ever been for a school. I was glad to bring that experience to the department.