Abstract:

In today’s society, the video, which is used in different ways in Education, is a means of expression in continuous growth, especially by higher education students. In addition to being a medium of reinforcement or feedback, a support or a subject to study, the skill of expressing oneself through video is becoming a cross-curricular competence to acquire unavoidably in the field of the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in these years.
Consequently, some years ago, we began to require the accomplishment of the creation of videos in the context of several subjects in the degrees of Computer Engineering at the Spanish Universities of UPV/EHU and La Rioja. In particular, those assignments were related to some topics covered in their respective syllabus or were used in flipped classrooms, and they were asked without providing any formal instruction to the students, in the belied of their own skills with technology and informal learning during the creation process. The satisfaction reported by those participants encouraged us to go further and to confirm the viability of the use of video in other centres and/or studies.
In this article we present the results obtained from a new experience of video usage in the context of university teaching in the area of Informatics at a French university along two academic courses with freshmen.
The key features of the experience are: (a) to propose small teams of students a micro-project to create, to edit and to publish a video on internet, without providing specific prior training of any kind; (b) to assess the generated videos by teachers and students based on a common framework of pre-established quality indicators and (c) to gather information through surveys of their previous competency levels, of their satisfaction with the process and made product, used tools and made learning.
The analysis performed on the gathered data has allowed us to state our proposal and to draw a set of conclusions about (i) the competences of university students regarding to the generation, use and management of the video as a communication tool, (ii) the conditions in which it is feasible to incorporate the video as a teaching resource in computer engineering studies in any course, and (iii) some learned lessons with regard to organize educational experiences based on this type of video project. Therefore, either by the previous levels of competence or by the informal learning during the experience, we have also found that (iv) students are able to develop further learning and relevant skills, such as, in our case, related to Project management.
These findings may be of interest or useful for any university teacher interested in incorporating video into their subjects, as the proposed experience has been proved to be extensible to other centres and studies.

Keywords:

student-generated videos, cross-curricular competences, informal learning, experiential learning, learning from doing.