Manuela Ramos Marques da Silva and Pedro Sidónio Pereira da Silva muse on their students’ preference for video learning
My 18-year old-nephew was recently sitting across the table from me, searching for a video about the mathematical Mengoli series. He is studying calculus as a first-year computer-science student at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, where I teach physics. I was just about to lecture my nephew and tell him that he should be using the beautiful LaTeX-written lecture notes provided by his teacher, which would include many pedagogical, and successively more complex, examples. But then I realized that I had just been watching a video on how to bake a pudding with Christmas leftovers, and another on how to try to fix my boiler that is refusing to heat water*. Indeed, I was not searching the Web for written information but instead for videos, because they provide a more efficient way to absorb information – so how could I censure my nephew?
I then asked him about the practice of the majority of students when it came to studying for their exams, and I also asked my colleague, Pedro Silva, to similarly question his freshman son. Their answers were revealing: both prefer to learn everything using online videos; preferably in Portuguese, or, if not, in English. They try to avoid proofs at all costs, and instead prefer to learn only the most efficient methods on how to solve the exercises. For a common topic such as the Mengoli series, one can easily find 20 online videos in Portuguese (and twice as many in English), each describing the mathematical series and how to solve exercises based on it.
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This made both Silva and me reflect on our own teaching practice. We spend a lot of time compiling good lecture notes, making appealing slides and looking for the most pedagogical manuals to follow. All the while, it seems that students are ignoring our efforts and basing their study on videos that we do not control or monitor. And reversing students’ appetite for easy, quick videos is not really an option. In Portugal, the vast majority of young adults own a smartphone or a laptop, and university students are permanently connected to the Internet via eduroam, or commercial Internet service providers. They watch videos on public transport, listen to content while jogging and biking, and even in bed before sleeping. These videos are always available, even at that peak of adrenalin that is the eve of an exam, when a teacher is not around.
So what can we university teachers do to resolve the situation? First, we should start making such videos ourselves. It would initially be a time-consuming task, but once a set of high-quality videos about introductory physics, say, are made, they would be useful for all courses from biology to civil engineering. As the videos would be created by a college teacher, the explanations would be more nuanced and accurate – for example, by stating exactly the validity of the approximations being made (or by injecting tips for exercise solving).
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Second, the teaching hours attributed to each subject have to change, in type and duration. If it is possible to replace a two-hour problem-solving class with a few four-to-five-minute-long videos, what are we doing with our time? Between sitting everybody down, waiting for all the students to try tackle the exercise, and waiting for all of them to finish taking notes from the blackboard, only part of the time is used to answer the students’ questions. But it is this face-to-face interaction that is most important, and is what we traditional, old-school teachers fear losing. Today’s video technology would greatly reduce the contact hours students have with teachers – indeed, a course could be done at a distance. That could have its drawbacks, though on the plus side it would open up well-structured and strongly taught courses to students all over the world.
But we should also change the curricula of teacher-training courses. Currently, teachers are encouraged to practise in front of a blackboard, and are trained to go through high-school manuals and look at text and written exercises with a critical eye. But there is no training in video-making or how to appraise educational videos. A lot more could also be said on the use of students’ smartphones as an instrument to record images and sound, or allowing the video analysis of moving bodies (projectiles, pulleys, rotating discs). A smartphone could also be used as a measuring device that incorporates some useful sensors for a physics class, such as an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a magnetometer or a light sensor.
And let’s not forget about researchers – should they be trained to share their research via video too? Graduates and doctoral students are often asked to give talks in front of audiences as part of their evaluation, but they are rarely asked to make a video. However, if you look closely at the homepages of most of today’s scientific journals, more and more of them are asking researchers to provide video abstracts, so that readers can quickly establish the purpose and results of the research.
We college teachers must catch up with video, before we are left too far behind
So it seems that we college teachers must catch up with video, before we are left too far behind. Our students have certainly moved on (without us noticing), making use of all the content available on YouTube and similar sites. They have reduced their studying time, freeing up more hours to spend on other activities – some of which involve videos too!
(*The pudding came out delicious; the boiler still jams; our kids passed the calculus exam.)
