Abstract:

Social media has changed the platform for social interaction and human experience in the last years. In this sense, educators nowadays have the perfect environment to incorporate Bandura’s Social Learning concepts, based on the enhancement of student’s learning using social media in daily classrooms, in order to stimulate students’ attention, memory, and motivation. However, not all the social media are adequate nowadays; for this purpose, it is necessary to understand new generation students to promote a contemporary learning environment using a social media that motivates them. In this framework, TikTok has been positioned as the main social network used by these students due to its easy use since it provides fast and concise information. In fact, many scientific communicators and professors use this social media to share information about science and classroom concepts. However, up to date, its use to generate learning short videos (microvideos) from a different point of view than those developed by professors has been not tested yet. Thus, in this work it is proposed that students prepare TikTok microvideos to improve their learning process. Besides, these microvideos can be valuable tools to promote that students in subsequent courses have access to more information from different points of view.

In this study, students from “Chemistry” and “Pharmacy” Degrees and from the Masters’ Degree in Experimental Techniques in Chemistry at the University of Valencia (Spain) were selected to record different theoretical, practical and tip videos on different subjects. For this purpose, students were organized in small groups (2-5 students), and they were asked to record a microvideo to be published in TikTok. The microvideos should follow the next criteria: (i) the selected topic has to be related to the subject; (ii) the topic should be agreed with the professor of the subject; (iii) the video should be creative, but it has to contain truthful information; (iv) microvideo duration should be 1 min or less and (v) the video should be recorded in 1080×1920 px. Then, after video recording by the students, the professor of the subject will check the information included in the microvideo to avoid errors or misunderstandings in the information. Finally, the accepted videos will be published on the TikTok account of the innovation group, where all the microvideos will be open access. After that, the students were asked to evaluate this activity with a satisfaction survey, which contained general aspects of this learning activity. Moreover, the activity was also be planned as a competition with an economic prize for the three best microvideos in order to promote participation in the activity. The best microvideos will be evaluated for all the professors involved in the activity taking into account creativity, capacity of synthesis, quality and veracity of the information transmitted, adaptation to time, clarity of speech and quality of the video. The last criterion is the social media outreach where the “likes” on TikTok will be taken into account. The results showed that most of the students were satisfied with the proposed activity, since they found it as a positive learning experience that help them to understand better the selected topic. In addition, the idea of free availability of these videos through TikTok for next year was highly motivating for the students.

Keywords:

Student-generated videos, nanolearning, TikTok, Social Media learning, microvideos.