Enabling a Comprehensive Teaching Strategy: Video Lectures

Introduction This research contributes to the resolution of two problems that occur in university-level education. One is how to help otherwise failing students or students uninterested in studying using traditional classroom lecture and text reading methods become academically successful. (At the university level, students' inability to learn or succeed in passing classes becomes a problem of retention.) A second is an aspect of "teaching to or below the mean"--how to avoid dilution of the curriculum and increase the complexity and amount of subject material covered in a course when a nontrivial segment of the class has difficulty learning the basics. Addressing these problems is particularly important in a university with a mission of teaching a broad spectrum of students. This study applies video lectures (a specific application of the broader technology "video instruction") as a way to leverage information technology (IT), not simply as a tool for recording and distributing information, but as a way to enable a comprehensive teaching strategy used throughout a course--a strategy that addresses these problems. Many different computer applications provide information to students and instruction--applications ranging from online lecture notes to limited topic, off-the-shelf instructional videos or simulations or to instructional videos that have been developed by educators as pedagogical methods used for their individual courses. As used in this study, video lectures are substantively different, delivering the entire topic content taught in a course's classroom lectures as portable lectures that students can rehear and study. Their content and pattern of topic development are specific and inclusive to what an individual instructor covers in the classroom. More important than being portable lectures to support initial learning or for review before an exam, video lectures enable a comprehensive instructional strategy that allows greater depth of coverage, with more classroom time spent on complex material that is interesting to many students and less time spent on basic explanations. Additionally, they support converting a large percentage of class time from classroom lectures to problem-solving labs that emphasize active learning. The video lectures are available to support students needing additional teaching time, whether on the basic or more complex subject material. Besides presenting the strategic design for this use of video lectures, this study provides initial empirical evidence of outcomes from their use. Outcomes include student perceptions of the videos' value, how they used the videos, and the videos' effects on student learning. This evidence adds to the literature, where the education literature has noted that the learning effectiveness of many IT applications is relatively unknown (Maki & Maki, 2000). Contribution to the Literature Elements of the current study are part of other studies but are considered in different ways. For example, Hornik reports the effect on student retention, course grade performance, and learning-process satisfaction of using IT-mediated learning with no face-to-face communication, e.g., online education (Hornik, Saunders, Li, Moskal, & Dzuiban, 2008). This research finds higher success when IT is used for instruction in introductory courses with a less well-developed structure of concepts and techniques than when this structure is highly developed. Alternatively, the present study evaluates the same outcomes but uses the more specific video lecture technology to re-lecture material that is presented in classroom lectures. The videos also support active-learning activities by providing complete lectures that can be reviewed for their coverage of concepts and methods occurring in difficult problems worked on in the labs. An additional study difference is that in the current study comparative success is found from using video lectures when the course is introductory and has a highly developed concept/methods structure. …