Abstract:

Videos are extensively used nowadays to support learners in a variety of learning scenarios such as traditional online courses, MOOCs, flipped classrooms and blended courses. The development of a video-based learning course is very resource-consuming. Moreover, the structure and content of the learning objects included in the course, as well as the interrelations among them, have a strong impact on its instructional effectiveness and success rate. It is therefore of prime importance to develop methodologies capable of producing effective video-based learning courses which lead to the highest success and to the highest learner satisfaction rate.

AMMIL (Active Meaningful Micro-Inductive Learning) is a methodology for creating video-based learning courses and their associated learning objects, which aims to maximise the motivation and instructional effectiveness in self-learning environments. AMMIL has been developed with the purpose of increasing the effectiveness of MOOCs based on the lessons learned from conducting a variety of MOOCs offered in the MiriadaX platform since 2013, including nine editions of the MOOC entitled “Design of Apps for Web, Android and iOS using HTML, CSS and JavaScript”, which amount to nearly 200.000 enrolled students altogether.

The AMMIL methodology goes beyond instructional design by providing more precise guidance on how to create both the structure of video-based courses for self-learning and the associated learning objects. The rules provided by the methodology try to minimise the student’s effort to achieve a given set of learning objectives in a self-learning video-based course, in which the students are engaged in a meaningful and inductive learning process based on microlearning resources. AMMIL relies on the PBL (Project Based Learning) approach to motivate student engagement.

The AMMIL methodology has been used with very promising results to create several MOOCs, as well as to support a flipped classroom experience in a programming course of the Bachelor’s Degree in Telecommunications Engineering from UPM (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid). This paper describes the main features of AMMIL and analyses the opinions of students in its regard in two different MOOCs and in a higher education programming course, in which different surveys were conducted.

Keywords:

MOOC, flipped classroom, self-learning, project-based learning, active learning, video in education, meaningful learning, inductive learning, microlearning.