Are video lectures helpful? Are they available?

Does your DL program typically offer asynchronous video lectures in DL classes? I don't mean instructional videos that were created by someone else, but traditional lectures that were created by your professor/department/school specifically for your course.

A department at U of MD has recently transitioned its DL classes from sets of uploaded PowerPoint slides to video lectures that use those same slides to mimic a F2F class (with the added benefit that you can now replay the contradictory sentence the professor just uttered as often as you like). Results appear to be very good. I'm wondering if this is a trend that other DL programs are moving towards, or if Maryland is an anomaly?

Past experience suggests to me that no one really reads that wall-of-powerpoint while they will listen to the same slides in lecture form. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about the pedagogy of it all, since one might think that the more active participation required in going through powerpoint slides on your own would increase learning.

 

My program at Southern Methodist University was entirely on video lectures. The distance learning students participate in the same as B&M students. The students can download the lecture by midnight after the class session has delivered. Distance learning students can present their project via PowerPoint with embed record audio.

My program at Troy University and Capella University are not in video lecture. I find that you have less material to read if there is video lecture; otherwise, everything seem to be your own.

Frankly, I found that video lecture is very helpful, especially it has to do with class material.

 

All Harvard Extension courses offered via DL are video-based. Some are live and real-time, using a program called Elluminate. Others are recorded and presented as Flash videos, usually within a day or two of of the live lecture.

 

Like Balios said, Harvard Extension uses lecture videos. In fact, most are from THAT course THAT week (a few are prerecorded depending on the course). I loved it, just loved it. I hate the lame multi-media crap churned out by the textbook companies to "accompany" the matching online quizzes. Those experiences, for me, are what I call "hunt and peck" classes meaning you hunt for the answer in the pdf and peck the correct answer in the text-generated quiz...LAME.

The HES classes are presented as if you are simply absent from lecture. In fact, even on campus students who are absent are expected to view the lecture. Attendance is not taken- so you could be on campus or DL and the requirements/responsibilities are the same. Simply, you have lecture and you have exams. Work is submitted via email. It was my best DL experience to date, and I think it's because it was the least technology driven content.

 

Thank you for the response cookderosa, there definitely needs to be some degree of separation between the similar material that is presented in different modes. If you don't have a professor telling you his understanding of photosynthesis AND a textbook describing the gory details, it's unlikely that you -the student- will successfully be able to create your own internal narrative by bridging the two.

This is why I prefaced my question by asking if these lectures were created separately from the person who produced your textbook. Based on responses and my own research, I'm surprised the larger schools like UOPX have not jumped on board with video lectures. I wonder why not, do they have standardized content of any kind? For 1.5k an adjunct, it's unfair to ask for original content, but based on responses it doesn't look like the for-profits think video lectures scale very well. I wonder why that is?

HES, SMU are all what I would consider high quality, expensive programs. Why are these the only ones creating video lectures, and why does it seem to be on a per-professor basis, and not a per-course basis? Could UOPX, Ashford, Argosy, etc really be that concerned with academic freedom?

 

My grad program at Walden used video lectures. That's one of the reasons I enjoyed the program. We got the texts AND DVDs of lectures/discussions with big name people in the education world. The DVDs were produced by Walden, not the textbook companies, so in a way they complemented the texts, but weren't just a regurgitation of material.

-Matt

 

This is a great question and has been at the heart of much DL confusion. The question is, do you translate the existing paradigm of the ‘sage on the stage’ into DL and just clone what has been done for 100’s of years but using internet technology as the delivery medium, or is there some other model?

Part of what I have been doing is going around the country and observing different teaching models in action, including my own of teaching every week in the community college classroom. I was actually very surprised in what I found. In my ‘western traditional’ experiences starting with elementary school, the U.S. system has used the one-to-many “I’m talking and showing, you follow and listen, and later I will evaluate your abilities with a test” model. There are other models. I just pitched a trial concept to my local school district to use technology to create a ‘learning fabric’, where the classroom experiences are only part of how the kids learn. Using technology it is possible to link into the TV shows they are watching, after school activities, and so on. I am lucky that the school district I am in has great parent involvement.

So back to higher education DL, I don’t know that having to sit in front of your computer watching a little box with a talking head in it is the best model, not saying it isn’t either, I just don’t know yet. I think a better model is probably more of a transition to small slices of content in a variety of formats, where you as the student can pursue the venue that is best for you and whatever topic you are on at the moment; where you are free to choose based upon your own situation, and change your mind whenever you want. Read some text now, watch a talking head now, do some practice exercises now, whatever works.

 

In the few courses I've taken online, my experience has been all over the place, with mixed results. For instance, I've already shared my experience on the HES program, but I'll use 3 bio classes I took at Ocean County College as an example. In the first class, microbiology, it was "hunt and peck" plain and simple. You'd have to be a moron to fail the course, unless you didn't do the labs (which were excellent btw) but the evaluation method was heavily weighted toward the quiz, so, I'm sure I was in the majority with my high 90's grade. Same department, different course: Anatomy and Physiology I & II. Much like you discussed, we had a variety of formats in which material was presented. There were typed course notes from our instructor, the multimedia presentation put out by the text company, the online "games and quizzes" also from the text company, and the text. In addition, since it was a lab course, we had a lab activity, a lab manual, and the lab website. In this case, it was information OVERLOAD in a serious way. When it came time for the quizzes, they required detailed recall that could have come from any one of the sources. Yes, they might be word for word taken from somewhere- but where? No critical thinking, no synthesis, just random trivial pursuit. I believe my quiz average for that class was in the low 70's. By far, that was a full year of the worst online study ever. It was too hard to get an A in those courses, and even though I did, I felt that my learning was a fraction of what it could have been in a better format. It took multiple hours just to get through the avalanche, that there wasn't any meaningful time spent marinating in the material. (in addition to the actual requirements of homework, lab, forum, etc)

So, what would I have done if I were the instructor? 2 main things. 1) Simplify the resources. In 18 years of teaching, I've found students do not enjoy multiple resources because at the most basic level of understanding- any inconsistency of message/conflict is very confusing. I confirmed this as a student in the A&P courses! It was awful. Let me learn the basics and THEN we can explore it critically. 2), I'd have scheduled the labs in a webinar. This removes the pain of digital lab reports (with a digital microscope, format nightmares, and photographic proof of each cut) and also allows the students to ask questions. You have no idea how many times I would wonder "did I cut correctly? Is this a deformity? Which nerve is this?" if I had an instructor on the other end of my webcam I'd have enjoyed the labs SO much more.

Of course I love the lectures, so I enjoyed watching an excellent A&P series on youtube as I studied, but again, to merge all of the material requires that the instructor be intimately involved with all of the sources, and I'm sure in my case they simply were not.

 

Video lectures are valuable, but one of the mistakes I have seen, even at the great school I'm attending, is the offering of video lectures without evaluation to determine if the student has watched the lecture. Even though the course work states that the student should watch the lecture, I find myself not watching them when I don't really have to to get a good grade. This is evidence of my own laziness, but I'm sure I'm not alone. It's kind of ironic; I think they are great, but I will not watch them unless I have to. Go figure.

PowerPoint presentations in an online class have always been a waste of time for me. PowerPoint was meant to be used to back up spoken words and, unless they are accompanied by a narration, I get absolutely nothing out of them and will almost never watch them.

 

You can actually check by your self.

YouTube contains hundreds of video lectures from leading universities.

I used these to supplement my studies, I used MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and many other leading school lectures.

YouTube - Prelude to Computer Science - 5: Binary Numbers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xILxbOkG8CE&feature=related

YouTube - Lec 1 | MIT 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Fall 2008

 

That sounds like a great program. I have heard good recommendations for the education graduate programs at Walden, is that what you were doing?

 

Definitely not alone! Even in the F2F classes in our Chemistry department, way too many people were just not attending lecture, and then failing the course. We ended up using "clickers" in F2F classes that allowed students to respond in lecture to a one-question multiple choice quiz using a remote-control that was registered to the student. Although it keeps them minimally engaged, it's mostly a butt-in-seat counter that makes sure students are attending lecture. I don't know if there is a similar technology for on-line classes. The mp3 videos we upload to blackboard don't have an ability like embedded quizzes, but that kind of technology would address your important point.

An end-of-video lecture-specific quiz wouldn't work because of cookderosa's excellent point about "hunt-and-peck." Most professors will make the quiz too lecture specific (decreasing actual learning), turning the lecture into a glorified treasure hunt.

 

Some program is produced by SMU; SMU used to feed all the lectures to NTU (National Technological University of Walden University). I think now, they have only one agree with Master of Science in System Engineering.

 

At Coastline Community College it was a blend of media that was used. There were lots of lectures that had been taped and presented, and I found that not only very helpful but more fulfilling to me as an online student.

Video or live lectures should be mandatory for online education, it gives IMHO that extra piece of the pie that seems to always be missing in distant education.

 

As I mentioned earlier in the tread, YouTube is loaded with video lectures, I used them in my studies.

Lectures from MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and many other fine universities.

Its free and out there.

 

I've had two econ courses in a row and especially in the latter course we had a terrible book, so I depended on Youtube lectures to help me understand the topics. I found that the lectures prior to assignments pointed me in the right direction in my readings and homework. Running through the videos after reading once again helped me understand difficult points that I wasn't able to easily grasp from the reading assignments.

 

Yes, I finished the MSEd in Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment back in 2008. I greatly enjoyed the program, and would do a Walden program again in a heartbeat if I had the time and money. Prior to Walden I had taken education classes through UoP and Virginia Tech. I found Walden's program to be far superior and feel I made the right choice.

-Matt

 

Hmmm.. Yes I agree with you on some level. For example my students at the community college get confused if I don't say the same thing in the same way about five times.

My default DL mindset is always around graduate management programs (don't know why this just seems to be my base algorithm), and here I slipped into that thinking concerning those types of programs. For me personally I sometimes like to watch a video, and sometimes don't. Matter of fact most of the time I don't because it takes soooo looooong to get to the important elements. However, in what I call 'tools' courses, courses where I have to be able to apply some technical skill like mathematics, accounting, or even economics, here I enjoy the option of video demonstrations, if I need them, so I can see what needs to be done if I can't figure it out myself. So I guess it is a mixed bag and the old adage of different strokes for different folks applies. By and large I still respond best to a book, an assignment, and a deadline to have it turned in, overall.