Experiences with Using Videos in Distance Education. A Pilot Study: A Course on Human-Computer Interaction

Introduction The number of online resources available for teaching and learning in higher education has been growing enormously during the last decade. Recent developments are the emergence of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and the OER (Open Educational Resources) movement. As a result a huge amount of enhanced learning opportunities exist. Examples are primary sources, instructive TED-talks, discussions between experts, recorded lectures, how-to-do videos, discussion forums, and so on. But to what extent are online resources actually used in courses? Studies indicate that despite the promise for use in education, online resources are underutilized. Harley, Henke, Lawrence, and Perciali (2007) found in an extensive study of humanities and social sciences faculty that use of digital materials created by other institutions was rather low. Lindquist and Long (2011) report that online primary resources are underutilized in humanities. In a study about open educational practices in higher education, Murphy (2013) concludes that the adoption of OERs and open educational practices is still in its infancy. Several reasons for not using online resources are mentioned by Harley et al. (2007), Eynon (2008) and Murphy (2013); among them are the following: * too many resources exist and it takes faculty simply too much time to assess their quality and usefulness for actual courses * problems with managing resources and organizing them for use in teaching * problems of fitting resources within the instructors' existing teaching approach * technical problems in having access to resources * problems with copy rights and availability of resources. Against this background we had the objective to find out the possibilities of substantially enriching an existing course with videos from external resources. The course is an introduction in Human-Computer Interaction and is mandatory in the bachelor programs Computer Science and Information Science of our university, the Open University of the Netherlands. The context is distance education. Our students are adults and overwhelmingly study part-time, combining study and work. The course offers no face-to-face classes. We offered the course with the videos to a pilot group of eight students and asked them to give feedback. We wanted to know: * to what extent the students actually watched the videos: were they ignored, used once in a while, used intensively? * how were the videos received? Which aspects did students like or not like about them, and why? * did students meet any problems in playing the videos? * what is the best context to offer links to videos: by way of an e-book, or by a pdf? In the remainder of this paper we first describe the course design and the pedagogical approach. Then we focus upon the role of the online resources, especially the videos, in the course. Next we present the feedback given by the students. Finally we discuss the results and reflect on what we learned. The Course: Content and Pedagogical Approach The course introduces the students to the basic concepts of human-computer interaction. The emphasis is on interaction design, with a user-centered approach. The students have to come to understand the users and their activities, to design an interactive system, and to evaluate prototypes with users throughout the design process. The design process consists of three stages. During the first stage the students analyze the users and the tasks they perform in the existing environment. They make a user profile (in the form of personas) and develop a task model (if appropriate). In the second stage the students design conceptual models of the system under development. To do so they develop several scenarios and a number of designs. They produce lo-fi prototypes, which they subsequently use for a first, informal evaluation with the intended users. …