Video-based Material Development during COVID-19 and its Impact on Learners: A Critical Perspective

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the impact of video lectures on the students of the Department of English of a Bangladeshi private university during the world pandemic, COVID-19. Using various online resources, especially YouTube videos, website links, e-texts, and journal articles, to make a classroom vibrant, interesting, engaging, and entertaining and to disseminate the best possible knowledge among students was the common trend in the classrooms of the English Department of Daffodil International University (DIU) before the pandemic. However, using teacher-developed materials in the classroom was not a regular phenomenon in the culture of higher education in Bangladesh, particularly in the Department of English at DIU. This paper will explore what kind of positive motivation this shift brought to get the students more engaged in the classroom during the worldwide crisis. It will also discuss whether the teacher-made video lectures helped students understand the topic(s) better. This study intends to address these issues besides inspecting the general pros and cons of using such materials in a tertiary classroom. The data were collected through close-ended and open-ended questionnaires from the selected students and analyzed using qualitative and quantitative research methods. The researchers hypothesized that teacher-made video lectures were more effective given that students’ and instructors’ similar stress and intonation, pronunciation, and cultural experiences which helped learners comprehend the lesson topics in comparison with materials prepared commercially. This paper also highlights the students' expectations and satisfaction, particularly related to the video lectures made by teachers compared to those taken from popular online resources.