How Science University Students use the Video in their Learning Process?

Abstract

Science disciplines require a high capacity for abstraction and the ability to apply knowledge for solving problems in different scenarios, making these subjects specially challenging for many students and even worse in online environments. In such scenarios, educational video has proven to be an adequate resource for the effective transmission of scientific knowledge. However, once a video has been created, it is difficult tuning videos to fit the necessities of every single student, as a teacher could do in a face to face classroom. Videos can be recorded again after getting students feedback, but it is very hard work. A better approach would be to create videos as tuned as possible to the students, but that requires to know in advance what are the students’ preferences and how they learn with videos. In this work we embedded a script in the web platform where the educational videos are provided to allow monitoring students’ interactions with the course educational videos (e.g., clicking the play, stop or pause buttons in the video player). The data generated by the script have been analysed to study the way students of Physics at the UOC use the educational videos in their learning process for several semesters and therefore to propose how to better fit students’ needs and problems in this resource. In addition, opinion questionnaires were analysed to contrast the results risen through the monitoring, and therefore to evaluate the perception of the students regarding the experimental data.