The two videos in particular that made the characteristics of a quality video clearer to me are “The Terror,” from week eleven of last year and “Signs of Crisis in a Gilded Age,” from week eight. In “The Terror,” I found it extremely helpful that everyone’s points of view were explained and considered valid, which was not the case in some of the earlier videos. This made it much easier to grasp the motivating forces behind the violence in Peru, and shaped it as a conflict between rational people. The I especially liked how the presenters concluded their thoughts with examples, which is another thing that many earlier videos lacked. Furthermore, the students clearly took great care in finding music and images to fit their narration, which made the whole experience of watching the video much more comfortable and easy to follow. In effect, it seemed to me that Camila Sol and Miles Zhang were able to tell a complete story, rather than simply expecting the viewers to agree with their conclusions.

Another of last year’s videos that I found helpful was “Signs of Crisis in a Gilded Age,” where I felt that the presenters did a thorough job of situating their content within numerous historical trends and narrations. It is also evident that they’ve taken care to weight their sources and they fully understood the values of different historical authorities.

On the other hand, I would say that “Caudillos Versus the Nation State,” from week five was among the worst that last year’s students produced. I find this topic particularly interesting and was particularly excited to start this video, and so I was very disappointed with how boring the video was. Despite my interest in the topic, I found it hard to concentrate on the narration, and my thoughts tended to drift as the speakers become more and more monotonous. The complete lack of visual aids also made it difficult to pay attention, and by the end of the video, I felt as though I hadn’t learned anything more about this subject.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first video “The Meeting of Two Worlds,” was hands down the hardest to get through. There was no flow to the narration, and important details were simply added on to sentences as though they were afterthoughts. Similarly, it seemed as though the narrators lost their train of thought numerous times, and went off on tangents all over the place. Most frustratingly, though, was their tendency to not explain anything fully, and instead simply stated “… in this period, many things changed in Latin America.” In this video, it seemed that all the major points were lost and only superficial details came through