Abstract:

Critics of higher education (c.f., Cary, 2015) have warned that the traditional higher education model and its standard mode of teaching must change or there will be dire consequences for higher education institutions. In addition, authors of studies over the years with groups as diverse as introductory psychology students in the U.S. (Van Blercomb, 1992) and medical students in India (Varu1, Vegad, Shah, Mehta, & Kacha, 2015) have lamented that attendance in class is dropping even though regular attendance is associated with better student performance. One proposed solution to this challenge has been flipped classrooms (O’Flaherty & Phillips, 2015). However, the typical flipped classroom still depends on the venerable and ubiquitous university teaching method—the classroom lecture, albeit delivered in online venues. In a larger study of online lectures, Brothen, Nichol, and Maruani (under editorial review) found that such lectures are not highly “attended” by students taking completely online classes and have only a very small positive effect on learning for those who do. Instructors who set about redesigning their courses to put lectures online and devote class time to interactive methods, might consider whether students will choose to watch the lectures and whether the lectures will have a positive effect on learning (c.f., Brothen & Wambach, 1999). This paper describes the evaluation of recorded lectures made available to students who had registered for either “flipped” or standard lecture formats in a large (> 1000 students) introduction to psychology course. In the standard format, students attended live lectures 3 hrs/week and a discussion section devoted to “doing psychology” activities 1 hr/week. The lectures were recorded and made available to all students within 5 min. In the “flipped” format, students watched the lectures online and attended identical discussion sections. The objective of the present study was to determine first, how much students in both formats chose to watch the recorded lectures and second, how much doing so was associated with learning outcomes. The lecture watching data in this study improved on the typical way researchers have assessed lecture viewing in online courses—surveying students about it. Use of the Mediasite lecture capture system allowed the tracking of users and recording their amount of lecture viewing. That system allows students to watch the lectures in one window on their computer screens and Powerpoint slides in a second window. They can stop and restart at any time during the lecture or quit after viewing part of it. When they restart later, they are brought back to the point where they stopped previously. This study concerned the total percentage watched for each lecture by each student—specifically, average percentage watched (from 0 to 100%) for each student for all lectures. Across both types of formats, lecture viewing was low even though it served as a way for students missing class in the large lecture section to access the material. Overall, the positive effects of lecture viewing were small and not statistically significant in many cases. In a more in-depth analysis, lecture viewing had some impact on exam performance but other activities had more. I discuss these results in the context of students’ expectations that lectures are part of a “normal” course and the need for instructors to find ways to make their courses more effective for student learning.

Keywords:

Online lectures, flipped classrooms.