Last fall, a non-faculty member at the college suggested that I could simply photocopy some of the material from my last evaluation because “how much could things have changed?” since I did my previous evaluation five years ago. I informed her that this was not a realistic possibility for a professor who cared about quality.

When I did my last evaluation, YouTube was little more than a year old and seemed to primarily serve the needs of teenage boys who wanted to post videos of themselves doing stupid stuff. It was definitely not a viable source for teaching materials. Although DVDs made some films more accessible than they were in the past, when you could get rarer films, silent films, and short films, you had to pay dearly for them.

The first time I taught film, I invested more than $700 to begin a film library. Because of my investment in short films, I was able to show more than 60 films a semester. As a result, students had a much higher quality experience than they could expect to get almost anywhere else.

I was very proud of the course and used it as the basis for my last evaluation. Yet, I would be embarrassed to submit the same course today because my abilities as a teacher have improved in the past five years. Furthermore, huge advancements in technology have increased the availability of quality films that can be screened during class.

Today, a search of YouTube for “short films” results in approximately 224,000 hits and there are about 94,500 “one minute films” available. Much of my $700 library is now legally accessible for no cost on YouTube or in other Internet venues as are hundreds—if not thousands—of feature length films appropriate for my student’s research.

The drop in cost for DVDs has also changed the landscape. Last year, I purchased a collection of 50 films for $19.00. Previously, I had purchased one of the films in the collection as a VHS tape for close to $30.00. Some rare films can be picked up for $5.00 or less. These $5.00 films were either unavailable or would have cost $20.00 to $35.00 five years ago. As the cost for DVDs have dropped, students have built their own libraries which they can use for the course.

Because of the easy availability of quality films, I no longer need to be the only person selecting films for my course. I am able to turn much of that responsibility over to my students. As a result, we are all exposed to a greater breath of films than was possible five years ago. As students take more responsibility for making film selections, my role has become one of introducing students to less accessible films such as Le Ballet Mechanique, a surreal film that no student would likely watch unless I screened it.

In the course I taught five years ago, I did an outstanding job of using state of the art technology to bring quality to my students. People who are not themselves in the classroom—even many who work in educational setting—do not appreciate the amount of effort it takes to stay current. For them, it might seem reasonable that we can use five year old teaching materials. But those of us who care about quality know that state of the art materials from five years ago are obsolete today.

–Steven L Berg, PhD

Photo Caption: Screen capture from Les Voyage Dans le Lune (1902). I spent several years trying to locate a copy of this film and finally found it as part of a collection of silent films made before 1915. The cost for the DVD collection was approximately $70. I believe that all of the films in the collection are now legally available through YouTube.