Abstract
Affordances of contemporary communications technology challenge the unquestioned assumptions and rationale of lectures. Furthermore, as students have changed their patterns of engagement with learning, universities have begun to reconsider their tradition of offering students lectures. These circumstances have prompted a group of teachers in one department to develop an alternative lectures: the bite-size mobile learning initiative. The initiative involved replacing some of the lectures with short video recordings of course material, “video-clips”, that could be watched by students at their convenience then elaborated and used to stimulate discussions in subsequent tutorials. We found that close to one-half of all respondents agreed or strongly agreed that video-video-clips worked as a learning tool, either alone or in combination with the tutorials; however, only 35% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they enjoyed watching the video-video-clips. The overwhelming majority of respondents agreed on one aspect: shorter is better.
Highlights
University teaching has come under the spotlight; it is subject to the same level of concern as the compulsory education sector
Video recordings, were a critical component of the mobile bite-size learning initiative, we report on three features of the video-clips, used in our pilot project
Of the total number of students enrolled in the three courses (N = 653), 437 students filled in the survey
Summary
University teaching has come under the spotlight; it is subject to the same level of concern as the compulsory education sector. Concern for the quality of university teaching is evidenced by the staff development units that have been established, teaching and learning conferences that are common events, and performance measures related to teaching imposed on academic staff by internal and external quality assurance bodies (reference). Even though lectures have been subjected to enhancement initiatives, they have largely remained unchallenged as a mode of teaching
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