A need exists to facilitate social as well as communal constructivism while fostering self-directed learning in language classrooms at university level. In this regard, videos can be used as a means to motivate students to critically interact with content and to engage collaboratively with new technologies. Furthermore, it is important to consider the duration of videos and as such, short instructional videos were employed for this study. This research reports on how student teachers perceived the creation and use of short instructional videos as multimodal open educational resources in an Afrikaans language classroom at university level. Short instructional videos (as a form of microlearning) boast many advantages that correspond with literature and the perceptions of students. In this article, a qualitative research approach was followed, which involved reflections by the participants submitted by means of a questionnaire with closed and open-ended questions. From this analysis, the following themes were identified: Challenges encountered by students, advantages of using short instructional videos, aspects enjoyed about creating the short instructional videos, and affordances of creating short instructional videos. From the analysis, it was clear that students are positive about the production and use of videos. It was also evident that variables, such as social interaction, knowledge of multimodalities, technical ability, device limitations and the topic of videos, all influence the nature of short videos in this context and that support in classes is necessary in this regard.