Abstract:

E-learning is an actual topic with increasing interest. Many universities today offer e-learning courses or at least support their “classic” courses with e-learning elements like videos, podcasts or other digital materials like virtual exam preparation opportunities and tests. Preparing and creating high quality content like this can be challenging and very time consuming. For our course (a class on advanced logistics in full-time bachelor studies taught in German) we tried to combine the creation of video material and an opportunity for students to prepare for their examinations. Exercises for specific lecture topics were given out to students and the students were then asked to prepare them (solo or in groups of two) in a way that makes them able to show and explain others how they approached their given task, solved it and calculated the solution. We then met with the groups in our studio to have them explain and solve their tasks again while being on camera. As (from our experience) many teachers and professors don’t like having their faces shown on camera, we chose a camera setup that only captured students fingers, their voices and what they were writing.

During the project we were overwhelmed by the high interest from students in participating. Every student of our course wanted to participate in the project and their motivation was pretty high. The produced videos were (to our beliefs) of good quality and perfectly suitable to be used as learning material for future iterations of our course. There were also some difficulties to which we weren’t prepared beforehand. As we promised participating students bonus points for their final examinations but not every student was able to speak German effortlessly, we had to find other ways for them to earn some bonus points which lead to higher workload from our side. Furthermore not every student is good at explaining complicated topics so not every produced video was usable for future teaching purposes. From a students perspective there are a lot of benefits – not only were they able to earn bonus points, but the project also forced them to work on examination relevant tasks way before the examination took place. Furthermore they were able to use their very own videos for exam preparation. Regarding future job opportunities in teaching students might be able to use their produced videos as a reference.

Keywords:

Content creation, e-learning, digital learning, experiment, video production.