Abstract:

1. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION
Blended learning approach combines face-to-face instruction with computer-mediated instruction. Blended learning environments, when designed appropriately, results in increased student engagement and effective learning (Hu, 2009). If the e-learning contents are not designed carefully, it may even reduce the effectiveness of teaching and learning (Marilla, 2006). To enhance the students’ learning experience, I recorded and posted the lectures of my course online. Though it helped some of the absentees, it really did not appeal to majority of the students for review or revision purpose. In the frenzied pace of modern life, it will be difficult for the students to listen continuous video for 2 hours, which is most of the time monotonous. However, posting selected portion of the lectures with some brief introduction in the face-to-face lecture, have shown positive effects.
I continuously observed the students response for 3-4 years in my course, and carefully identified the topics, on which (after the lecture) the students had lots of questions and required clarifications. A short analysis on these questions revealed that, most of the questions were due to either lack of full attention during the lecture and missing the fine details or due to misunderstanding. I shortlisted these topics and picked the top three for this experiment. It is obvious that these topics need repeated explanation. But, why the questions were focused only on these few topics? Were they hard to understand? While reviewing the course contents, it became clear that, these topics were highly associated with either their day-to-day computer applications they were using or the practical tasks (course requirement) they had to complete. An obvious and related issue was that the students also felt that the practical assignment related to these topics was too hard.
To mitigate this issue, several common methods and tools can be used such as FAQ’s, repeated explanation and posting recorded lectures. I recorded and posted the lectures on these selected topics for the next few batches as described below.

2. EFFECT OF AUGMENTING RECORDED LECTURES TO THE COURSE
I pre-recorded the lectures on the selected topics instead of live-recording for simplicity. Each video covers only a specific topic and do not drag for more than 30 minutes. They were short covering only the ‘teachable points’. Pre-recording also gave me an opportunity to use ‘see what you learn’ approach for effective learning. I linked every part of the recorded lecture to a video demo showing how the theory is put into action. The students got an introduction during the face-to-face session and then they followed the video for the details.
To my delightful surprise, the contents were very well received by the students and I saw around 250% access to the contents in each of the observed semesters. All students in a sem accessed the contents at least once and some students have repeatedly accessed the same lecture up-to 12 times. It made even a weak student to complete the practical assignment on these topics successfully.

In summary, this experimental study proves that, effective use of e-learning tools (especially, recorded lectures) comes through identifying the specific objective to achieve, the right content and presenting it in a right way through intelligently exploiting all the features provided by the tool. More details and analysis will be presented in the full paper.

Keywords:

Blended learning, technology, experiment.