Converting a lecture to online activities and resources

Although lectures have been around for quite some time, there may be times when alternative formats are better suited and more impactful on student learning. For example, when we are looking at new ways to get students to interact with a discipline, or engage in more complex problem-solving tasks, or develop certain skill sets, or apply their creativity, or deal with high amounts of information in a more accommodating environment.

Alternative online formats may include a series of online activities (e.g. discussion posts, surveys, quizzes), short videos, audio recordings, and readings. If you have lectures in your subject and your feel the student learning experience may be improved through alternative modes, then you will find this guide helpful in explaining the steps you can take to convert your lectures.

Breaking up your lecture into a series of activities

Understanding the lecture

Firstly, we invite people to stop and reflect on the lecture as a format. While there may be as many lecturing styles as there are lecturers, if you bring to mind your favourite lecturer, they probably use a wide range of approaches to keep their lectures lively. This may involve a dynamic mix of presentation, demonstration, critical viewing, discussion, collaboration and problem-solving activities – and even the odd joke and anecdote.

When trying to convert material from a live lecture to just media, the results are often underwhelming, and the student may be presented with a playlist of overly long narrated slideshows, with none of the variety of a good lecture.

Unbundling your lecture

One way we help educators to overcome this is to encourage them to break down the lecture into chapters, map these chapters to a variety of easy to produce video styles, then intersperse these chapters with alternative activities to create a Canvas LMS module.

If you have access to a prior lecture capture recording, accessing an automatic transcription can help staff with this. It lets you identify the logical breaks and can give you a head-start when it comes to scripting. Find out more about automatic transcription in EchoVideo (Lecture Capture).

Example activities

With the appropriate educational technology, the below example activities can be created to intersperse media as online active learning activities. See our examples of these activities and how to implement them:

Design for accessibility

When designing your activities and creating your online content, assume that some students will have impairments in vision, hearing or have neurodiversity considerations. If a tool or content is not accessible by all, be ready to provide an alternative activity.

An example of converting your lecture in a series of activities

Let’s take a hypothetical example of a 90 minute lecture on the history of art. The typical lecture involves:

  • 10 minutes of subject updates and housekeeping
  • 40 minutes dedicated to the introduction of key ideas historical context for the week
  • 10 minute break
  • 10 minute detailed analysis of 4 famous works of art, accompanied by high resolution images
  • 20 minute Q&A with students to finish.

How would we translate this to an online format?

1. Record an introduction

When moving this content online as pre-recorded video, we first take out all housekeeping and present it as LMS text so that it can be easily updated. Next, we plan a topic introduction video – presented directly to the web camera – and embed that in our module to set the context for the week. Read our DIY guide to video.

2. Create a reading activity

After that, we might insert an active reading activity. Make readings available to students through Readings Online to meet copyright requirements. Students should know what they need to read, when they need to read it by, and why. This can be well contained in a reading guide, and you can make the activity more active by including activities that involve Feedback Fruits Interactive Document assignments, Canvas LMS discussions or Canvas LMS quizzes etc.

3. Record a discussion video

Next, we might want to map part of our lecture content to a discussion or interview video. A recorded interview can be great way to expand on a topic, and to interrogate newly introduced concepts from a range of angles. If you’re having trouble finding a suitable interviewee, you could even arrange for someone to interview you. See our guide how to record and embed an interview using Zoom.

4. Create a discussion activity

After a pre-recorded discussion video, insert a discussion activity for students and link it to the content covered in your introduction video, reading activity and video discussion. More about discussion and chat tools for teaching and learning.

5. Record a narrated video

For the second half of our lecture, the image-led nature of the content suggests a series of short, narrated videos – one for each artwork – would suit. There are multiple tools available for recording narrated image or slide shows, but the simplest might be to use EchoVideo (Lecture Capture) browser capture or EchoVideo Universal Capture.

6. Create a quiz activity

It’s often good to tie together the individual learning activities within a module with a quiz activity. This can be done with an LMS Canvas Quiz or as an H5P.

7. Tying it all together

During the process of rethinking our lecture, we have taken a 90-minute lecture, unbundled the concepts and contents of the lecture, created three pre-recorded videos using three simple to produce formats, and interspersed three activities using tools in the LMS to make an engaging and coherent replacement for the lecture.

LMS tools to support converting your lecture

Staff resources

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This page was last updated on 17 Apr 2026.

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