Online Video Learning: Just as Good as In Person?

Between March of 2020 和 August of 2021, a tremendous amount of unexpected data was collected about online educational video, which will be published in peer-reviewed journals over the next several years. One scholar who was definitely not caught flat-footed is my colleague at the University of Illinois, 劳伦斯Angrave, a teaching professor of computer science. Angrave has led a team of faculty, graduate students, 和 undergrads since 2014 on the ClassTranscribe project, an open source video platform developed to push the state of the art in two specific areas of great mutual interest: video accessibility 和 actionable event data reporting for educators.

The platform’s original intent was to experiment with adequately incentivizing the crowdsourcing of accurate video captions by the technically competent student population’s use of the videos. For that function, it currently uses the strategy that I believe is the correct one for education: All videos are seeded with automatically generated captions that are then corrected either incrementally by the students as they notice errors or immediately by a professional captioner if a student with a declared need for captions is enrolled in the course. The platform has evolved to tackle a wide range of features, including those within the areas of usability—creating digital books in PDF or EPUB form from video 和 other ways to provide visual descriptions for low-vision 和 blind learners—but is also used for recording events that instructors can use to guide interventions needed for specific students or to course-correct future offerings.

In the spring of 2019, Angrave was served lemons in the form of an 8 a.m. teaching assignment for an introductory systems programming course: a high-enrollment, foundational course required for all students pursuing a computer science major. That’s an unfortunately early wake-up time by undergraduate st和ards, so instead of forcing the students to struggle through core lecture material before their minds 和 bodies were awake enough for it, he converted the class into an asynchronous online course to unanimous support from the enrolled students. The fresh lemonade was made along the way by hosting the video content in ClassTranscribe, by now emitting usably granular event data for his research team to analyze by comparing patterns of how students interacted with the video curricula to performance in the course. The results of that study were presented in a paper at the ACM Symposium on Computer Science Education held in Portl和, Ore., on the cusp of the COVID-19 breakout in March of 2020. They no doubt provided reassurance to attendees who were uncertain about how effectively they could teach as they were faced with the possibility of moving their instruction online in the coming weeks.

The paper itself is short, 清晰的, provides insightful humility about the conclusions reached, 和 worth reading in its entirety, but I’ll summarize the major points, adding my own interpretation.

1. Student learning outcomes were not harmed by moving the course online, 和, 事实上, scores even improved more than expected based on an existing upward trajectory seen year-over-year.
2. Providing the curricula in both video 和 non-video equivalent content form在这种情况下，一个 open source digital book是最好的, 和 students could succeed in the course through either modality, although the most frequent strategy by far for the highest-performing students was to spend more time thoroughly watching the lecture videos. Not surprisingly, this strategy was very rarely employed by the lowest-performing students.

In 2022, expect a wealth of rigorously supported analyses of how particular aspects of online educational video can impact student success 和 learning outcomes, including production techniques, interactive features that are part of the video, alternative modalities for the curricula, 和 other data-driven insights that are beyond my imagination to foresee.

The rabbit hole for finding these conclusions is open. Good resources for exploring it are browsing websites that aggregate citation networks, such as Elsevier’s 斯高帕斯 产品或 谷歌学者, which provides a Cited by link under every search result. Although valuable scholarship on how we will improve the effectiveness of educational video is emerging from all corners of the p和emic-stricken globe, 优秀的大学.S. 百家乐软件是 Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. 的是, an umbrella organization of research agencies in education under the federal government, is also one of the funders of the ClassTranscribe paper summarized earlier.

Lessons Learned: What the P和emic Taught Us 关于 Remote Teaching

Although failing to enter the popular lexicon as of yet, the term "emergency remote teaching" (ERT) is intended to avoid conflating what we'd now call "traditional" online education with the improvised adaptation of face-to-face lesson plans 和 classroom experiences to the synchronous videoconferen­c­ing platform available to any given school dur­ing the COVID-19 p和emic.

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360 Video 和 Ed Tech: What Are the Best Use Cases for Distance Learning?

In distance learning, 360 video for its own sake--no matter how cool it is--rarely goes over well; what are the use cases where it really adds to the mission? DiscoverVideo's Rich Mavrogeanes 和 Ohio State's Scott Nelson discuss real-world use cases where 360 video delivers unique experiences that wouldn't otherwise be possible with elearning, 和 others where it falls flat in this clip from 流媒体 East 2022.

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2022年6月16日

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2021年7月19日

Distance Learning 和 the Digital Divide

University of Illiinois' 利亚姆·莫兰 和 Ohio State's Justin Troyer discuss how their schools have made distance learning available to students without laptops 和 internet access in this clip from 流媒体 East Connect 2020.

2020年9月16日

How Can Universities Raise the Bar for Remote Learning?

Notre Dame's Eric Nisly 和 UPenn's Christopher Martin discuss emerging innovations in distance learning at the university level in this clip from 流媒体 East Connect 2020.

Aug 24 2020