Abstract:

E-learning is becoming more and more popular in schools and universities due to the advancement of a digital society. The COVID19 pandemic has also greatly driven the widely development of e-learning as a way to cope with emergencies. These have made e-learning indispensable in education and a trend in the long run. To help provide students with better e-learning experience, researchers are carrying out studies regarding methods, effectiveness, and problems in e-learning. Since we have found scarce work comparing the effectiveness between two commonly used types of e-learning materials - PowerPoint slides and videos, we carried out this study to provide insights to instructors and educators who are involved in design of e-learning materials. We investigated about 400 freshman students participating in a non-majors course of information science at a national public university in Japan. We created PowerPoint slides and the corresponding video version exactly the same in content and explanation and provided them to students together with a textbook, whose points were shown in the slides and whose content was read out as narration in the video. The students learnt by themselves online with no time restriction and were allowed to ask questions via an online message board. We investigated learning performance and level of satisfaction by using a quiz at the end of each chapter and a questionnaire at the end of the course. We found that students learning by using the videos tend to spend less time, achieve better performance, and show higher level of satisfaction than those learning by using the PowerPoint slides. The difference between the two groups in learning time and performance seemed not to be very significant but the difference in level of satisfaction was significant. The findings suggest that animations may help students follow more easily the explanations and provide better learning experience than pure lists of points and books. The results also indicate that a video version of explanation such as a CD disk attached to a textbook is likely to improve effectiveness and experience of independent learning.

Keywords:

e-learning material, independent online learning, effectiveness and efficiency, learning performance, student satisfaction.