A Course-Embedded Comparison of Instructor-Generated Videos of Either an Instructor Alone or an Instructor and a Student

Abstract

Instructor-generated videos have become a popular way to engage students with material before a class, yet this is a relatively unexplored area of research. There is support for the use of videos in which instructors tutor students, but few studies have been conducted within the context of a classroom. In this study, conducted in a large-enrollment college physiology course, we used a randomized crossover design to compare the impact of two types of instructor-generated videos that students watched as part of their preclass assignments. We compared videos featuring only an instructor (instructor-only videos) with videos featuring an instructor tutoring a student (instructor-tutee videos). We analyzed student survey responses and weekly physiology quiz scores and found that students preferred, enjoyed, and valued the instructor-only videos significantly more than the instructor-tutee videos. In contrast to prior literature, students with a grade point average (GPA) below the median (3.49) performed significantly better on physiology quizzes after watching instructor-only videos compared with instructor-tutee videos. Students with a GPA at or above the median performed equivalently on physiology quizzes after watching instructor-only or instructor-tutee videos. We present this study as an example of bringing cognitive science studies into the context of a real physiology classroom.

FIGURE 1.

Screen capture of instructor-only videos (A, B), in which the instructor alone was present, and instructor-tutee videos (C, D), in which the instructor appeared with a student. In both sets of videos, slides with content information and physiology problems appeared in the background. The Wacom Tablet allowed for the instructor’s annotations to appear on the slide so that observing students who were watching the video could see the instructor’s writing. In instructor–tutee videos, both the instructor and the student annotated the slides on the screen.

FIGURE 2.

Depiction of experimental design. During weeks 1–4, students in group A watched instructor-only videos and students in group B watched instructor–tutee videos. During weeks 5–8, students in group A watched instructor–tutee videos and students in group B watched instructor-only videos. At the beginning of every Friday recitation, both groups of students completed the same in-class quiz about the content presented in the respective Friday videos. At the end of week 4, after watching one type of video, and again at the end of week 8, after watching the other type of video, students completed an online survey about their opinions of the type of videos that they had recently watched, either instructor-only videos or instructor–tutee videos. The survey at the end of week 8 also asked students open-ended and closed-ended questions about the videos.

FIGURE 3.

Extent to which students appreciate instructor-generated videos. Twenty-seven percent of students strongly appreciated the videos, 49.3% of students appreciated the videos, and 18.8% of students somewhat appreciated the videos. Nearly 4% of students somewhat did not appreciate the videos, and 1.0% of students did not appreciate the videos. No student reported that he or she strongly did not appreciate the videos.

FIGURE 4.

Student video preference. Nearly 60% of students preferred the instructor-only videos, 20.3% of students preferred instructor–tutee videos, and 19.8% of students had no preference. These frequencies were significantly different, χ²(2, 207) = 65.77, p < 0.001.