STUDY ABOUT THE YOUTUBE DIDACTIC MOVIES FEATURES PREFERRED BY STUDENTS IN DENTAL MEDICINE

Abstract

The didactic movies uploaded on YouTube are a very popular learning resource used in the academic environment, because it stimulates the students' engagement and motivation. We conducted an opinion survey among 170 students (average age 20.93 ? 2.751) at the Faculty of Dental Medicine, "Grigore T. Popa" University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Romania, about their interest in using educational movies as didactic tools, and the features they prefer in such materials. We used an anonymously questionnaire with 15 items to investigate the students' opinion about certain features of the didactic movies, which can be included or avoided in order to stimulate the learning and are highly responsible for the educational videos' cognitive value. For the statistical processing of collected data we used the Two-Step Clustering procedure, for qualitative data. The procedure identified 5 distinct clusters, with sizes between 30 (17.6%) and 43 (25.3%) from the total number of cases. The clusters quality wasn't the best, but still we were able to identify among the investigated features the most important predictors, which are: the presence of background music in the movies; the presence of images used to fill the breaks; the movie's total length shorter than 6 minutes; the using of explicative notes for charts and drawings displayed directly on the drawing and the movie's design as a PowerPoint presentation, with images, diagrams and animated schemes. The scientific literature provides many information about the features recommended to be used in didactic movies but, as far as we know, a classification regarding the relevance of these features was not discussed yet. That is why our study brings useful information in this area, helping the content developers to improve the quality and the popularity of the didactic materials.