Abstract:

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been gaining a lot of attention in the last years. Those courses and their videos are often professionally produced and incorporate a significant investment of time and financial resources. In many cases such courses are “flagship” productions of the associated school or university and produced with budgets lecturers in other institutions do not have available. This makes the use of videos in a regular teaching environment challenging. In addition, lecturers often act in high-teaching-load environments further tightening their capacity constraints. This raises the question whether and how lecturers can benefit from videos in their lectures for increased teaching effectiveness while not sacrificing teaching efficiency.

The paper at hand attempts to address this question by providing a critical perspective on the use of videos in a high-teaching-load environment characterized by little financial and staff resource availability. The paper thereby builds upon the three years’ experience of its author in using videos to enhance lectures in German tertiary education institutions in a multi-language, i.e., English and German, teaching environment. The presented findings are both relevant for teaching practice and research: lecturers may benefit from the presented ideas and experiences and may adopt them for their teaching. Researchers may find starting points for new research opportunities on the effectiveness and efficiency of video-enhanced lecturing and learning.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the context of the study from an institutional and technological perspective. Section 3 outlines the methodology applied and 4 how data was collected. Results from data analysis are presented in section 5. The paper concludes with a reflective summary and outlook in section 6.

Keywords:

Videos, screencasts.