Abstract:

Maastricht University is at the conclusive phase of a video project, aimed at creating an institution wide video support service. One of the deliverables is collecting and sharing good practices on the use of video in education. These practices were collected by interviewing over fifty members of teaching and support staff of thirteen Dutch higher education institutes, one American college, and one Belgian university. Additional information was obtained from academic publications, events, and special Dutch national interest groups on media in higher education. A collection of these good practices are presented in this paper.

As Maastricht University is a face to face university that uses a problem based learning (PBL) methodology, the section on didactics focuses on PBL in a face-to-face setting. Nevertheless, the collection of good practices presented, may be of interest to teaching and support staff members involved in the use of video higher education institutes that use other types of teaching or learning methodologies.

The paper attempts to define and categorise educational videos according to their learning goals, as well as their production formats. Likewise, the good practices are divided into in four domains:
(1) education,
(2) video design
(3) video support, and
(4) video production.

The section on education addresses examples of successful implementation of video in a PBL setting. Examples are student generated clips and flipping the classroom. The practices relating to video design, support and production apply to most higher education institutes, both face to face and online. The goal of the paper is to inspire and inform higher education teachers, support staff and managers.

Video can be an effective tool for activation. It is important, however, to align the video with learning goals and activities. It is important to keep in mind that the creation and implementation of video can be an expensive and time consuming process. Institutes that choose to promote the use of videos among their teaching staff, are more likely to succeed if carefully plan their time and financial investments. The threshold for teachers may be lowered when relieved from supportive tasks. The practices presented in this paper are aimed at inspiring teachers and curriculum designers and at providing input for the discussion on the development of video support facilities that best fit the needs of an institute, its’ students and staff.

Keywords:

Problem based learning, video in education, web lectures, flipping the class, good practices, video design, video format.