Abstract:

People have been talking about flipping their classrooms all over the world these days. Flipped classrooms do have the advantages to allow students to learn at their own pace before class and more time can be saved for in-class activities that help learning at depth. However, as more and more classes are flipped, students, especially those not as bright, are complaining about heavy workload before each class. Is there a way to ease this out? Should all classes be flipped and face-to-face lectures be wiped out altogether? Or should we also try to make our lectures more interesting and engaging for our students, so that more can be inspired?

Interactive lectures in a highly-rated animal physiology class of ~50 students were recorded every time using the Panopto Video platform. Recordings were made available to students right after each class. Students loved the lectures and found the recordings very useful as reflected by the free comments they put down in the term-end course evaluation. In order to figure out how students used the recordings and how this might affect their academic performance, usage data were pulled out and an online survey was also conducted after the final exam to see how, when and why students used the recordings from their point of view; course performance was then compared against these. Results suggest that these recordings served different students differently. Though 97.2% of the respondents (n=37) found the recordings very useful (86.1%) or pretty useful (11.1%), students were using these for different reasons. Some interesting findings will be discussed.

Keywords:

Lecture recording, self-paced learning, useful study aid.