Abstract:

Educational videos have had a transformative effect on education. When published on platforms like YouTube, educational videos are accessible for free for anyone with an internet connection. They can thus reach viewers who can’t access formal education, or who need extra help in studying but can’t afford personal tutoring. They have proven to be very useful teaching tools within any educational setting, allowing students to learn at their own pace. Teachers use videos in face-to-face classroom teaching sessions and online learning environments. They make watching videos part of their students‘ compulsory homework or recommend selected videos for individual study and revision. University students as well as younger students in secondary schools use videos at home to revise, train, and prepare for exams. There is no major field of study for which you can’t find numerous educational videos on public online platforms. Given the enormous importance of videos in present-day education, they are still understudied.

Of course, there are numerous resources available on how to make a good educational video. Many of these have been created by academics who are experts in their fields, and they offer plenty of useful advice. However, these resources often focus on technical details and design choices; they are „how-to“-tutorials for those aiming to produce educational videos that are fun, engaging and have a professional look. In my contribution to INTED, I aim to do something different: I want to identify criteria that can be used by teachers to analyse and evaluate videos they think about using or recommending to students. These criteria can also serve as a guideline for those aiming to produce theit own videos, but they won’t focus on technical questions. They will relate to questions of content rather than questions of design.

I will start by making a necessary distinction between instructional videos and educational videos – terms that are commonly used interchangeably, but actually say very different things about the videos they refer to. Whereas instructional videos deliver instructions on how to do something (how to remove elements from a picture using photoshop; how to solve a complex equation; how to perform a certain type of surgery…), educational videos offer more than just information, explore controversial topics and discuss questions that can’t be answered easily. The kind of knowledge they aim to convey is more general, less instrumental.

As criteria for what makes a good educational video vary strongly between disciplines, I focus on my own field of study, philosophy. I have selected a number of English-language videos discussing the famous „trolley problem“ devised by Philippa Foot that I want to analyse and compare.

Like any other mode or form of teaching, these educational videos can be analysed and evaluated based on sientific theories of teaching and learning. My analysis will be based on models of teaching philosophy that have been developed by Rolf Sistermann (Rolf Sistermann: Unterrichten nach dem Bonbonmodell. Ein Musikvideo als Hinführung zur Reflexion über die Endlichkeit des Lebens in einer Unterrichtseinheit für die Klassen 8-10, Zeitschrift für Didaktik der Philosophie und Ethik 4/2008, 46-54) and Ekkehard Martens (Ekkehard Martens: Methodik des Ethik- und Philosophieunterrichts : Philosophieren als elementare Kulturtechnik, Hannover: Siebert, 2003).

Keywords:

Educational videos, quality, analysis.