Using video in distance education teaching materials

Once again, it’s time to review student feedback, and student still indicate a desire (not huge, but present) to have a formal lecture. It’s an interesting dilemma to consider as a course developer – students appear to want what they do not then appear to use.

We have moved away from formal one/two hour lectures for a range of reasons. These include:

• research continues to indicate long class-based lectures are less effective ways to teach concepts, and they are very ‘teacher-centric’;
• on-campus students don’t turn up, so you can be teaching for an hour to a couple of students if class numbers aren’t huge;
• recording of long lectures for distance students takes up bandwidth and includes lead-in issues with technology;
• recording of long lectures creates a ‘dip in and out’ mentality for on-campus students who don’t come to class but then don’t fully engage as a distance student and don’t read associated resources (effectively only getting part of ‘the story’); and
• general technology issues, such as sound and vision quality associated with recording a class-based lecture.

Our university has developed a wonderful analytic system that allows us to view the popularity of resources. In my recent class (Term 2, 2014) of 188 media writing students, 73 of whom studied online, the statistics speak for themselves.

During term I held six online lecture sessions (one per fortnight) whereby students could log in online. Each lecture focused on core concepts covered during the course of the fortnight, with attention to what we were looking for in assessment. Numbers included:

• Session 1 (Week 2) – seven attended, 75 viewed
• Session 2 (Week 4) – five attended, 46 viewed
• Session 3 (Week 6) – six attended, 50 viewed
• Session 4 (Week 8) – four attended, 18 viewed
• Session 5 (Week 10) – two attended, 11 viewed
• Session 6 (Week 12) – one attended, 10 viewed

In addition to these video lectures, there were nine video-based sessions throughout the course. Two of these were associated with orientation, and four with assessment. Three were related to course content, response to one of of which was assessed. Details are below:

Section	Video	Clicks	Comment
Intro	About Kate	57	Intro to the Course Coordinator
Into	How to search the forum	10
Assessment	Overview of Assessment 1 – Criteria	267	Guidance to Assessment 1
	Overview of Assessment 2 – Criteria	159	Guidance to Assessment 2
	Overview of Assessment 3 – Criteria	139	Guidance to Assessment 3
Assessment Resources	An example of how to use Storify	19
Week 4	Why you need a plan	158	Overview of plan. [Students required to summarise for assessment]
	Video – Miliband Loop	51
	Video Lecture – Miliband Loop	42	CC summary of the Miliband Loop video

Course content is supplemented with the use of PDF files, weblinks, and storify collations.

As expected, there is a clear alignment of access to supplementary materials with assessment. In contrast, PDF files that provided core context throughout term were accessed consistently. For example, Week 1 Study Guide Lesson (448 clicks), Week 2 Study Guide Lesson (338 clicks), down to Week 12 Study Guide Lesson (71 clicks – the lowest).

It was therefore interesting to read Ljubojevic et. al’s research into using supplementary video material in teaching (2014). Their research examined the use of supplementary videos within lectures and involved testing acquired knowledge and quality of experience with supplementary videos. Some key points of their research included:

• Continual presence of lecture content (ie. long lecture with no video inserts) resulted in the least number of correct answers;
• Inserting video resulted in a higher number of correct answers regardless of the position or context of supplementary videos; and
• Memory and better understanding in the learning process may be increased by inserting video clips throughout the learning journey;
• The biggest influence on efficiency of learning is a method based on inserting videos in the middle of the lecture presentation;
• The attention of participants was maintained at the highest level during the session with the use of educational supplementary videos, especially if they were inserted in the
  middle of the presentation.
• Better efficiency is achieved if educational content congruent with the lecture was displayed;
• Entertainment videos aren’t as efficient, but can be used to engage and motivate student learning.

There are no surprises here.

What’s important to consider, however, is how to convert these to distance education-based practice.

Inserting videos while already ‘online’ for a video lecture is a challenge for both instructors and in Australia, marred by poor-bandwidth as a general concern. Finding critical points to insert video, and then articulate their relevance in learning to students as part of course design is the key.

It can be very time consuming and demanding to prepare and deliver online lectures to a small group of students, especially when you accept that they don’t pre-prepare for class, and generally are attending as passive recipients of ‘how-to’ information. My course design drives student action through assessment, so I’ve actually learned to accept a more passive approach to lecture attendance rather than fight it. My days of spending hours preparing for an interactive and interesting lecture and then having to re-think when only a couple of students turn up are long gone. My video lectures focus on practical problems with walk-throughs of how to do/think/approach something.

My reflection based on this past term is to reduce the number of video lectures, and think about how to create shorter concept-based videos for students. I will perhaps hold two to three longer lectures that pull together ideas or simply allow students to generate questions and topics based around assessment.

Reference

Ljubojevic, M., Vaskovic, V., Stankovic, S., & Vaskovic, J. (2014). Using Supplementary Video in Multimedia Instruction as a Teaching Tool to Increase Efficiency of Learning and Quality of Experience. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 15(3).

Online Education and the ‘Cost’ Imperative

I am always interested in the relationship between online education and substandard quality. It was good to read, therefore, a comment piece by Jason Lodge in today’s Conversation. In the article, titled ‘Higher Ed changes will lead to higher fees, more online delivery’, he writes:

To design and effectively deliver high-quality online degree programs, knowledge of the content, the technology, and teaching itself is necessary. It isn’t effective to just bolt new technologies and innovations onto existing pedagogical approaches. Using new tools often requires a complete redesign of learning activities, assessment and the broader curriculum. As new ways of communicating online become available, it is necessary to constantly revisit how to make the most of them.

While I could argue that the headline suggests that online delivery is a bad thing, I won’t go there in this post. The two points I want to make are that online delivery is not necessarily cheaper, and that I agree with Lodge that technology is only one aspect of high quality online delivery. The critical point here is the redesign of learning activities and assessment.

In my experience, technology for the sake of technology is problematic in online delivery. Just because we know that people are starting to grasp the world in ‘fragments’ doesn’t mean that delivering a course in fragments – click here, click there, watch this, comment in this forum, go here to complete this activity – is a satisfactory experience. I recently studied a distance education course and was frustrated by the requirement to be online all the time – all content was web-page only, and all assessment was by wiki/forum post/online interaction. It seemed to be ‘for the sake of being interesting and different’ rather than ‘this will help you meet your learning outcomes’. As an educator in media and journalism, I require students to complete assessment via blogging/Twitter/Storify/SoundCloud/YourListen, so they have to engage with technology. I’ve experimented over the years with different approaches to content delivery – all information on a live web page, information on a word document, information via CD/DVD, information via PDF. As noted in an earlier post, I experimented with Prezi to deliver a staged assessment task, I’ve used video lectures to deliver content, and even contacted students individually to talk through issues.

Ultimately, however, students seem to be happy with the basics. Distance students are by nature motivated and busy. They’ve enrolled in this mode for a reason, generally, and in my experience they want things to be simple. I have reverted to PDF files which are easily downloadable/readable on mobile devices; I’ve stopped doing routine weekly lectures because students might say they want them but our analytics suggest that very few actually watch them and they are extremely time-consuming to develop and deliver (rather, I focus on specific points of issue that require explanation); and I’ve opted for putting the majority of my effort into great assessment design. This, however, is also time consuming. Designing assessment that is scaffolded, allows opportunity for feedback (in some cases on more that one occasion), authentic, and engaging employs significant resources by a team of staff.

A recent example was a news writing course, whereby we redesigned the course so 80% of assessment was writing based, and students needed to write a news story every fortnight based on real events (court/council/local issue). In class, you can ask students to write a story after attending court, for example, and mark it on the day, working through it with students. In this case, I employed an industry mentor who was responsible for advising/supporting/marking half the class so we could turn around assignments within a week. It was the only course I’ve taught by distance which had a 100% completion and pass rate. A great result, but asking for marking assistance for a course with only 15 students in it would be questioned at higher levels.

It’s an example, though, of how those who are great distance educators live in the ‘problem-based teaching’ world. It’s not a case of just delivering mass education via technology to students ‘out there’. It’s a case of developing a learning environment and support structures that so students achieve good outcomes. All my news writing students were writing professional, publishable work by the end of term. It wasn’t cheap, it wasn’t easy, but it was effective and I can be confident that in moving to the next level of their program they’ll be employable before they graduate.

I consider distance education students to be a ‘class’. I set aside contact hours (which would be the same as being in class with students) whereby I am online/available by phone to talk to students. The number of contact hours increases based on the number of students I have, so it’s generally 20 students per two hour contact blocks. This forthcoming term I’ll be responsible for 60 – 80 students across two courses, so that will be three to four contact blocks.

Whether I’m a good educator is not for me to judge – it’s for my students and peers to do this. The point I need to make that those of us passionate about distance education put time and effort into the process. Distance/online education shouldn’t be equated with poor quality. I don’t think the MOOC rush has done us any favours because it’s promoted the idea that education can be ‘massified’ and devalued the assessment process (in my view), but it would be nice to see some empirical data to support the fact that learning can be as valuable/engaging when managed from afar. I’m on a mission to find some.