High- vs. Low-quality Video Lectures - Don't Worry, Just Put them Online!

This position paper claims that a major obstacle of offering video lectures for public universities appears to be the fact that they intend to compete with prestigious private universities regarding quality of the videos and complexity of the installed platform without being able to provide the additional resources required to do so. We argue that in other areas of teaching this issue has been acknowledged for a long time, and lacking resources are usually compensated for by primarily two means: individually offering provisory course material (manuscripts), and active participation of the student body in administering those. Based on this, a simple system is proposed that mostly draws on existing platforms and tools, and refrains from extensive video editing prior to publishing. We discuss technical and non-technical requirements and possible research directions that result from establishing such low-fidelity video lectures.