Of course, the use of video in academia is not new, as evidenced by educational channels on YouTube, iTunes U and so on, not to mention sites such as the Periodic Table of Videos (www.periodicvideos.com) which intend to introduce sciences to the masses. Yet, while anecdotal evidence gathered through informal feedback suggests that our students enjoy the process, the potential benefits of video in terms of critical reflection appear less clear cut.
The specific research questions that this project seeks to tackle are therefore as follows:
To what extent does the medium of video help to develop an awareness amongst our students, from an early stage of their degrees, of the significance of transferable skills relating to employability (such as critical reflection and the ability to communicate complex concepts) in addition to technical skills (such as the ability to use a particular programming language)?
To what extent do students themselves accept the medium of video as an approach to critical reflection?
Longer term, to what extent can the critical reflection of one student benefit other students - does the application act as a bridge between PDP and peer mentoring?
We begin with a summary of the results from a short questionnaire, followed by a discussion of two projects involving the use of video within two separate first year modules, before documenting the student-centered design and development of the Let Me Demonstrate (LMD) application.
public/private blog article, producing a video for a public/private video-sharing application, producing a public/private podcast, contributing computing-related content to Wikipedia, lab tutoring, and contributing to an academic journal/conference paper.
To comply with our University's ethical procedures, all questions were optional. A link to the survey was distributed through an internal mailing list to computing students, to contacts in computing departments across Scotland, through the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) Education mailing list, and finally through the HEA Computing Update newsletter in May 2012.
Results and Discussion
A total of 284 responses to the questionnaire were received. Of those who provided their gender, 78.2% of respondents were male and 21.8% were female. 77.8% of respondents were between 18-25 years of age. Almost all respondents (81.3%) were registered as undergraduate students, although there was a mix between years (24.1% in Year 1, 26.7%
in Year 2, 23% in Year 3 and 25.7% in Year 4).
Many of the respondents reported contributing to several resources, both online and offline.
110 respondents reported that they contributed an answer to a query on a Q&A site, such as Stack Overflow or Yahoo! Answers, while 44 respondents ran their own computing-related blog. 40 respondents contributed content to Wikipedia, while 28 uploaded content to video- sharing websites such as YouTube and Vimeo. The top three reasons for undertaking such tasks were: 1) to improve future employability prospects (33.7% high, 26.8% very high), 2) to develop self-confidence in particular subjects (44.4% high, 14.6% very high), and 3) to be able to reflect on acquired knowledge (44.6% high and 13.5% very high). On the other hand, financial rewards (23.1% high and 11.2% very high) and undertaking a specific activity because a classmate or another contact does so (27.5% high and 4.3% very high) were the lowest rated reasons.
In terms of the extent to which students would be willing to undertake certain extracurricular learning activities, responding to queries on forums (43.2% comfortable and 35.3% very comfortable for public; 41% comfortable and 37.1% very comfortable for private), followed by producing a blog article (42.8% comfortable and 24.8% very comfortable for public; 41.5%
comfortable and 25.6% very comfortable for private) were the most popular responses, while producing a computing-related podcast was the least popular, with just 24.9% comfortable / 9.4% very comfortable for private podcasts and 27% comfortable / 7.2% very comfortable for public podcasts. Many of the reasons given in the free text section for this question were quite telling, particularly in terms of the perceived fragility of knowledge - for example, ''I'm not skilled enough to contribute'', ''I am not confident enough in my own knowledge'' and ''I would not be comfortable in presenting myself as some sort of 'expert'…however, I would be happy to share what I have learnt with others as an equal, not as a form of authority''. A much smaller number of participants noted the effort required to carry out such activities may prevent them from doing so, for example: ''Many of the tasks would be quite time consuming, and that would be the constraining factor rather than the nature of production itself''. Interestingly, whether or not the resource being contributed to is private or public appears to have little effect, generating conflicting responses. For example, in terms of benefits of private resources, one respondent noted: ''[I am] much more willing to contribute to closed group mediums because constructive criticism is good [but] anything more is not cool''. However, other respondents were more in favour of public resources, for example: ''I respect people who make learning available for everyone. I don't like keeping learning private''. A second respondent noted, ''I don't like to post on forums where access is closed to the public. It tends to mean that it's not one I'm using regularly and thus don't understand the netiquette for the site. Eternal September is a real thing''.
While this was a small scale study, and therefore providing strong conclusions would be premature, a few tentative observations can be made at this stage. Firstly, those students who carry out some of the activities described above recognized that the transferable skills they gain from doing so may benefit them in terms of future employment prospects, rather than for any financial rewards. On the other hand, respondents felt that the public nature of resources which support such activities may expose a (perceived) lack of, or fragile, knowledge, which may prevent those students particularly from the early stage of their degree in engaging with such resources. In order to further investigate these issues in the wild, we carried out two studies into the use of student-produced videos as reflective practice.
3.2 Study 2 - Student Workshop
Following on from the survey, we decided to run a workshop session involving a cohort of undergraduate computing and product design students to investigate the extent to which students accepted the video medium as a form of critical reflection, and to consider whether any of the issues students reported as part of the survey could be lessened through video.
The results are discussed in more detail elsewhere (Martin et al., 2013) so a summary will be presented in this section.
Data Collection and Methodology
40 students took part of the workshop, made up of students from level one Applied Computing, students from an HNC computing course, and level two Product Design students. The workshop was undertaken as part of a core Data Visualization module, approximately halfway through a fourteen-week semester.
The workshop was designed as a three-hour practical session. Students organized
themselves into groups (there were 12 groups in total), and were asked to choose a group assignment they had recently worked on. They were then asked to spend approximately one hour producing a reflective video explaining the code, and how they approached its
development, using either the CamStudio screen-capturing software (www.camstudio.org) available in the School labs, or the video capturing technologies available on their personal laptops or mobile devices. No specific time limits or production constraints were set; rather, students were encouraged to describe their work in whichever way they felt was the most appropriate within the available timescale. In the second half of the workshop, students were brought together to watch the resultant videos, and were encouraged to feed back what they felt were the benefits and drawbacks of the approach in terms of contributing to their
learning.
Results and Discussion
All groups produced a video, the shortest of which was one minute 26 seconds, and the longest of which was eight minutes and 23 seconds. Presentational approaches varied - some groups filmed the action on their monitor using a smart phone, while others used screen capturing and video editing software. In terms of explaining the code, some groups undertook a ''think-aloud'' protocol to walk through their code, while others used text annotations to highlight specific aspects.
Feedback from the session was mixed. Many students suggested that revisiting and explaining their code through video, sometimes two to three weeks after it was originally written, an extremely useful exercise in terms of positively impacting on their understanding.
Students recognized the benefits of producing a video to improve communication skills, while also suggesting that undertaking the activity within their group added to the experience and contributed to team bonding. Finally, and particularly pertinent to our overall research,
some proposed that their videos could be shared, thus recognizing that their learning achievements may help others. On the other hand, embarrassment associated with the video medium - for example, being ''in front of the camera'' and hearing one's own voice - was seen as a significant drawback, as was a perception that the process supposedly exposes a (perceived) lack of, or fragile, knowledge. While we expected the videos to be rough and ready, many students expressed concern over the quality, either because they felt they were not given enough time, or due to particular technical issues such as the lack of appropriate microphones and difficulties extracting videos from mobile devices. Indeed, while it is possible to produce video content of acceptable quality using phone cameras and screen capturing software, the audio quality of such devices can be extremely variable.
Additionally, despite the technical nature of the degree, several students had limited experience using video editing or screen capturing software, and therefore found the process quite difficult.
While the study was conducted within a short timeframe, the workshop enabled us to
consider the potential role of student-produced videos as a means of critical reflection and in crystallizing knowledge for communicating to others. Such transferable skills are vital as graduate attributes, but it is important that students are provided with the opportunity to constantly improve those skills during the course of their degree. We believe that
encouraging students to produce short reflective videos of their work at regular intervals is one such example. In the next section, we describe a semester long study, in which students were required to do just that as part of a specific module.
3.3 Study 3 - Embedding Video in a Module
A second evaluation was conducted as part of a Physical Computing module, a first year second semester module undertaken by students of Applied Computing, Computer Science, Product Design and Software Engineering students from a local college. In this module, students design and develop ''off-desktop'' interactive digital artifacts which do not fall into the traditional mouse, keyboard and monitor paradigm of computing. This makes it more difficult for students to share the product of their learning, unlike, for example, a web site or an application which can more easily be shared over the internet. As a result, we were keen to devise a method that allowed students to share the results of their projects through short video demonstrations and blog posts.
Data Collection and Methodology
Drawing on the overall philosophy of our research, we were keen to encourage students to share not just the results of their work, but also to critically reflect on their experiences producing their artifacts. We encouraged students to share content through ''off the shelf'' tools such as Wordpress and Vimeo. We held preliminary lab sessions on video creation, and highlighted the benefits of self-reflection and the potential cementation of knowledge through explication and externalization within those sessions.
Student groups were allocated in the first week of the semester. The first activity involved the production of ''getting to know each other'' videos, in which groups were asked to produce a 90-second introductory video. Following on from this, students were encouraged to generate video and blog posts throughout the semester to share the results of what they had produced with others, and to reflect on what they had learnt. None of the activities were assessed, so there was no direct impact upon grades.
At the end of the semester, a feedback session was held, in which students were asked to reflect on the benefits and drawbacks of using video.
Results and Discussion
There were six opportunities for groups to produce a video throughout the semester. In total, 57 videos were produced out of a possible 96 (refer to
lmd.computing.dundee.ac.uk/?page_id=171 for examples), which we believe is a reasonable response rate for a voluntary set of activities. However, there was an inevitable tailing off of video creation over the course of the semester. In the first few weeks, all groups produced videos, but this decline to around 20% of groups towards the end of the semester. However, there was an interesting ''spike'' during week 6 as part of the ''pressure project'' in which students were required to rapidly design and build a simple, playful, system using a randomly assigned sensor. At this stage, 75% of the groups produced a video, which may suggest that students are more motivated to put in this extra work when they have produced something they want to ''show off'' and have put a significant amount of effort into, rather than midway through a project.
In terms of feedback, many of the benefits highlighted in the previous workshop were further confirmed. Students commented that they shared their videos not only with their classmates, but with those outside the course such as family and friends. Students also identified the potential peer mentoring benefits by commenting on the ability to learn from what other groups were producing and what they could learn from them. Additionally, several students mentioned that the process had brought them closer together as a group, as the process of preparing and recording videos involved all group members. Finally, several students commented on the potential for using the videos as a reference and revision tool.
On the downside, technical constraints were once again highlighted. For example, several participants commented that uploading videos to Vimeo was extremely time consuming.
Again, embarrassment associated with the video medium - for example, being in front of a camera or hearing one's own voice - made for an uncomfortable process amongst some students; however, some groups compensated for this in imaginative ways by, for example, placing their project at the centre of the video (so that their faces were never on screen) or, in one case, through the use of sock puppets! Finally, some students struggled to see the point of the exercise, commenting that this is not an activity they would expect programmers to do. However, we would counter this by suggesting that, while they may not be tasked with producing videos in their future post-education careers, the experiences gained from
critically reflecting and communicating the results of their work will lead them in good stead.