Exploring physics students’ engagement with online instructional videos in an introductory mechanics course

Abstract

The advent of new educational technologies has stimulated interest in using online videos to deliver content in university courses. We examined student engagement with 78 online videos that we created and were incorporated into a one-semester flipped introductory mechanics course at the Georgia Institute of Technology. We found that students were more engaged with videos that supported laboratory activities than with videos that presented lecture content. In particular, the percentage of students accessing laboratory videos was consistently greater than 80% throughout the semester. On the other hand, the percentage of students accessing lecture videos dropped to less than 40% by the end of the term. Moreover, the fraction of students accessing the entirety of a video decreases when videos become longer in length, and this trend is more prominent for the lecture videos than the laboratory videos. The results suggest that students may access videos based on perceived value: students appear to consider the laboratory videos as essential for successfully completing the laboratories while they appear to consider the lecture videos as something more akin to supplemental material. In this study, we also found that there was little correlation between student engagement with the videos and their incoming background. There was also little correlation found between student engagement with the videos and their performance in the course. An examination of the in-video content suggests that students engaged more with concrete information that is explicitly required for assignment completion (e.g., actions required to complete laboratory work, or formulas or mathematical expressions needed to solve particular problems) and less with content that is considered more conceptual in nature. It was also found that students' in-video accesses usually increased toward the embedded interaction points. However, students did not necessarily access the follow-up discussion of these interaction points. The results of the study suggest ways in which instructors may revise courses to better support student learning. For example, external intervention that helps students see the value of accessing videos may be required in order for this resource to be put to more effective use. In addition, students may benefit more from a clicker question that reiterates important concepts within the question itself, rather than a clicker question that leaves some important concepts to be addressed only in the discussion afterwards.

Examining the relationship between student performance and video interactions

“…Our data was collected in a calculus-based introductory mechanics course in the Fall 2013 semester taught using a flipped model at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At the time of the data collection, the course used the Matter & Interactions curriculum [7] while implementing short video lectures [1,2] in addition to in-class problem solving and novel laboratory activities [8,9]. Students' enrolled in the course spent class time focused on various problem solving activities.…”

“…Each row-entry of this matrix we denote as a feature vector. The laboratory-videos retained a high percentage of viewer-ship throughout the semester as compared to the lecture-themed videos, which saw a time-dependent decay of access rates [1]. Because students continued to watch laboratory tutorial videos, we were able to directly model student performance using feature vectors on multiple laboratory assessments.…”

“…Lin et al [1] investigated student-video interactions in the same course and with the same cohort of students * Corresponding Author: solli.robert@gmail.com as in our study. In their work, correlations between student-video interactions, average laboratory scores, and performance on exams and FMCE tests were investigated.…”

“…Most research has focused specifically on the student interaction with the lecture videos. Prior work has shown that students are more likely to finish watching a tutorial laboratory videos in comparison to a lecture videos [1]. Additionally, students returned to pieces of videos that were specifically related to the laboratory activities [2].…”

“…Additionally, students returned to pieces of videos that were specifically related to the laboratory activities [2]. In addition, depending on the content of the video, student "in-video" drop out rates have been demonstrated to vary according to the video production quality and the length of the video [1,3,4]. Furthermore, students have shown that their decision to watch a specific video depends on how much the video is related to the course content [1,5].…”