2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Educational videos can be an impactful means of sharing engineering curriculum to a broader audience. Videos provide opportunities to compartmentalize information and take audiences on journeys beyond their local communities. However, one of the biggest challenges is how to develop these videos. Although the material is technical in nature, the discussion and approach cannot follow the same structure or delivery as a typical course lecture. The paper herein follows the journey of a civil engineering educator in the establishment and development of a series of educational videos on Youtube. With an identified goal to expand the broader public’s view of civil engineering and the newly developing sub-field of sustainable structural resilience, bringing engineering to life takes many forms. This work examines the steps in establishing the protocols for proper assessment, story boarding concepts, executing video plans, bringing these videos to life through careful editing, and general lessons learned in developing video themes. Technical theory is a cornerstone of engineering curriculum but can be quite unapproachable as it requires prior knowledge and familiarity with field specific language. Systematically building up context and breaking down subject matters into more digestible pieces of information support the audience’s ability to connect with material and begin to identify key field specific terminology. Beyond the technical knowledge, it is essential to humanize the field and expand audience’s perspective of who engineers are. With growing interest in social media, a major element of this is the social perspective and the curiosity of how engineers can be social individuals within their respective communities. To do this, the educational videos share ways engineers communicate and network through events such as conferences. The development of educational videos is not a straightforward process nor is there one correct approach. Rather, it is a journey of evaluating the educational goals and embracing the ability of video to transcend time and space to bring engineering to life.