Studying Online;Succeeding through Distance Learning at University

Coping with online presentations 165 
begins. You can then move the “Start” slider to that position, 
trimming of the nonsense at the start. You can do a similar thing 
for the last slide, but this time trimming of the material after 
the presentation itself has fnished. Doing this will tidy up the 
start and end of your presentation video, improving how it is 
perceived. 
Of course, you can go to all kinds of lengths to edit the video and 
add a range of features to it, such as captions and fancy graphics. 
Unless you are on a media course, where you will inevitably have 
access to proper video editing software, it is highly unlikely that 
doing anything sophisticated with your presentation video will 
have any impact on your marks. However, if you want to stand out 
or take some pride in your work, there are free online video edit-
ing programs that can help you spruce up your work. Two that are 
often used by students are Clipchamp 
(
https://clipchamp.com/ 
en) and WeVideo (www.wevideo.com). 
consider presentation fle sizes 
When recording videos, one issue you will need to take care of 
is the fle size. Recorded presentations can be very large indeed. 
Many VLEs will have size limits for the fles you need to upload 
for assessments. Tis could mean that your recorded presen-
tation is too large to submit. Tere are a few ways around this 
problem. 
One way of reducing fle size is to convert the item to a diferent 
format. Tere are plenty of video and fle conversion programs 
that you can download free of charge. You may need to experi-
ment a bit, but often by saving to a diferent acceptable format, 
you can reduce the fle size signifcantly. 
Another way of dealing with the fle size is to create a “Zip” fle. 
Tis is a compressed form of the fle that can save space. On a Win-
dows PC, you just right click on the fle and choose “Send To” and 
select “Compressed (Zipped) fle”. On a Mac, you control-click on 

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