Watching Videos Improves Learning? An Effective Use of Short, Simple, Instructor-Made Videos in an Engineering Course

摘要

Keeping up with trends in technology use among students is always a challenge. Students, like much of society, are increasingly "pulling" their desired content from the web (news, entertainment, etc.) rather than simply acting as passive receivers. The growth of on-demand internet viewing on YouTube and NetFlix in combination with the diminished power of the big three networks is a great example of this trend. Education, however, remains generally out-of-sync with this trend; we still rely primarily on a "push" approach. Today's students desire more and more control over how they get their information both in their courses and in their lives. This paper reports on a notably successful attempt to create a resource which augments traditional classroom instruction and can be used at the time and place of the student's choosing. By creating short, simple videos using easy-to-use technology, instructors discovered that students not only appreciate having the resource available, they also improve their learning with its use. Students in the civil engineering program at the United States Military Academy who used these videos as they prepared for mid-term exams performed better than those students who chose not to make use of the resource. In addition to the marked improvement in academic performance, feedback from students was overwhelmingly positive.