Pre- and Post-Class Student Viewing Behaviors for Recorded Videos in an Inverted Sophomore Mechanics Course

Abstract

The inverted classroom has gained significant traction in higher education over the past several years. While inversion can take on many specific forms, it usually implies some shift of theoretical lecture content away from the in-class time and into the student time spent outside the classroom. Students are expected to watch recorded video lectures before coming to class and then the time in the classroom is spent with students working on problems in some form. This active learning strategy allows the focus of faculty-student interactions in class to be on the application and higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy that are usually targeted in engineering and similar technical courses.While these pre-recorded lecture videos are an essential component of an inverted course structure, little data has been made available on how students actually watch these recorded videos. This paper presents the results of a study of student viewing behaviors for pre-recorded video content in an inverted introductory sophomore mechanics course. Data is presented for both theory-based lectures intended to be viewed prior to class, and for recorded example problem solution videos that review problems solved during class meetings.Data from the video distribution system was used to answer a series of research questions related to student viewing behaviors. The observations presented in this paper indicate that on average, students watched a little more than half of the recorded lecture content that they were expected to. Viewing rates steadily decreased throughout the semester, but were not affected by video length or day of week. Female students were found to exhibit significantly higher viewing rates than their male counterparts. Effectively, no correlation was observed between viewership rates and course performance as measured by final course grades. Introduction/Course StructureIn the College of Engineering at Villanova University, several courses have been transitioned to an inverted format over the past four years. In the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering alone, the entire five course sequence in mechanics and structures is now offered in this format as indicated in Table 1. In all five of these courses, students are required to watch theory-based lecture videos that are designed with the primary intent of preparing students for solving problems in class. While the format and delivery of the lecture videos is similar, the strategies for encouraging, ensuring, and rewarding students for watching videos vary among the individual courses. Some courses give credit for viewing videos, and some courses use short quizzes based on the lecture video content. The course that is the subject of the study in this paper, Mechanics I, does not give any credit toward the final course grade for watching videos, nor does it rely on quizzes related to the video content. Mechanics I is an introductory mechanics course that covers traditional concepts of Statics and Mechanics of Solids with emphasis on axial loading. Basic mater...

Analysis of Basic Video Metrics in a Flipped Statics Course

“…2. Compare trends and correlations from this study to those previously published (specifically those in [11]), and discuss the effects of differing course structures and instructional strategies.…”

“…They also found that students who lacked in pre-class participation were not hindered relative to their performance in the traditional classroom parts of the course, but they did not flourish in the same way as their peers who made good use of the flipped-class resources. Gross and Dinehart [11] performed a quantitative analysis of video viewership in a sophomore-level engineering mechanics course and analyzed viewing data on a per-student and per-video basis. Their study reinforced the findings of [2], [10], confirming that student engagement has only a weak correlation with performance, and that student engagement tends to decrease as the semester progresses.…”

“…This study was conceptualized with an intent to replicate the analysis in [11]; to investigate which trends and correlations held across institutions/instructors among flipped classes dealing with similar subjects. As such, many definitions and methods used here are directly borrowed from [11].…”

Student Video Viewing Habits in an Online Mechanics of Materials Engineering Course

“…It is vital to understand more about hybrid class videos and to ensure that the most effective format, the Kahn Academy style, improves student learning [4]. The effectiveness of videos depend on factors such as the individual lecture, video length, and the date of the video [3].…”

“…Student characteristics such as gender where women have higher total views, or students pre-course GPA where students with higher pre-course GPAs tend to have higher viewing rates, can correlate with student viewing habits [3]. It is also known that students use videos to supplement online face-to-face lectures in hybrid model classes [6].…”