Nobody watches bad TV twice. Students don't drop a course for the same reason - but the dynamics are surprisingly similar. In an era of mediated learning, your students are an audience. And audiences allocate their attention to whatever competes most effectively for it.
Think Like a Showrunner: Designing Engaging Online Learning Through Pedagogical Production argues that broadcast production has already solved the problem most online instructors are struggling with. The tools, the vocabulary, and the design discipline exist. They just haven't been translated for the classroom - until now.
Drawing on learning science, Community of Inquiry research, and Mayer's Multimedia Learning principles, this book introduces Pedagogical Production: the intentional design of the visual, auditory, and interactive environment that supports learning in synchronous online instruction. It is not a book about making class look like Netflix. It is a book about reducing the cognitive friction that competes with learning - and replacing it with the conditions that make learning possible.
You will learn to think at five levels simultaneously - from season arc to the single shot - and build a production system that runs reliably without heroic effort each week. Through twelve chapters, practical frameworks, and the recurring story of Dr. Morgan (a good teacher who suspects there's a better way), you will make four mindset shifts, build five systems, and redesign what students experience from the moment they join your session.
The tools are free or nearly free. The learning curve is real but short. The shift in perspective, once it happens, changes everything you see when you look at your class setup.