New Perspectives in Science Education

This research explores the creation of video resources to support an undergraduate practical class and students’ interactions with these Moodle based video resources and ancillary assignments over an academic year. This was achieved through an observational study of a cohort of first year undergraduate students (n = 303) undertaking a first-year chemistry module. In addition, the students were surveyed in order to evaluate their own self-reported experiences of using the video resources and associated quizzes. Two data sources were used to inform the observational study and generate analytics Moodle log data and Video Analytics data provided by the video hosting platform used (YouTube). This is accompanied by statistical analysis of survey responses. The relevance of different sources of Moodle log data and the transformation of the data into analytics is briefly explored. Students' experience with the online learning environment and the deadlines which were set for their assignments was assessed by means of a survey containing Likert scales as well as free response questions. Students were surveyed after completing each term. In total, 256 students returned valid responses to the survey. 11,862 video views were registered across 34 videos which supported the practicals while over 4800 quiz attempts were recorded for 18 supporting quizzes. By taking advantage of the detailed information captured by Moodle and YouTube about users’ interactions, analysis of student performance and engagement was undertaken. The creation of high-quality video content is a time intensive activity (Muller, 2008) and the videos used in this study are divided between two distinct modes of production. One is the production of in lab videos showing practical techniques. The second is the use of a lightboard studio (Birdwell et al., 2015). In this study, student engagement, measured in terms of time on task is evaluated. The mode of video production is known to be a factor in the utility of video material (Guo et al., 2014). A critical analysis shows the relative merits of each method of production in this context. Finally, some of the insights gained from the research which have led to changes in practice are examined. In all, this research demonstrates the value of analytics as a means of evaluating teaching practice from both a student and lecturer perspective.

Keywords: Blended Learning, Flipped Classroom, Chemistry.

References:
[1] Birdwell, J. A., & Peshkin, M. (2015). Capturing technical lectures on lightboard. Paper presented at the ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.
[2] Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: an empirical study of MOOC videos. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
[3] Muller, D. A. (2008). Designing effective multimedia for physics education. PhD, University of Sydney, Sydney.