Dr Atm Alam, QMUL Westfield Fund Winning Project 2021
Over the last almost two years, most education institutions have adopted some forms of remote online teaching and learning due to COVID-19. In most cases, educators offer blended learning using remote online learning involving both synchronous and asynchronous elements (a mix of live and pre-recorded video lectures). While the pre-recorded video lectures have many advantages ranging from easy to access anytime and anywhere to learning at an individual pace, students are unlikely to engage with these videos in settings full of distractions. This has been evidenced by our recent observation of data analytics from different learning management systems, such as, BlackBoard Collaborate and Echo360 during and (in some cases) post-COVID-19 pandemic while adopting remote online teaching and learning, that students are less engaging to the online video lectures and are sometimes lost and/or bored after watching, e.g., few minutes of video lectures (losing motivation). On the other hand, it is also evidenced that short videos on social media (e.g., TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.) are widely popular. Additionally, the attention span of humans has been decreasing every year due to many factors (e.g., digital addiction, digital interference, multitasking, etc.).
This project funded by Westfield Grant is inspired from the short-form videos in social media with the fact that short videos are highly engaging and entertaining. It enables the content producer more freedom to focus on the subject and produce hard-hitting, relatable videos that get to the point, without the overhead of creating more in-depth content. Therefore, a new framework, named social-media like short-video lecture (SML-SVL) framework, of delivering online video lectures has been proposed and developed in teaching and learning practices, where video lectures are being streamlined or compartmentalised to fit into smaller chunks with each chunk being based on a single topic. According to learning analytics after adopting the SML-SVL framework, short video lectures show higher engagement performance as compared to video lectures of longer lengths.
This proposed framework also has other benefits of enhancing student experience such as, (i) excellence in the learning environment by making short video lectures accessible, flexible, effective, easy to navigate and fully utilised at any time and anywhere (since the video is focused on a specific topic) as well as co-creating new knowledge by students; (ii) excellence in student engagement by actively engaging and becoming individualised learners and building positive relationships with teaching staff as active learners (e.g., directly interact with specific video content using comment facility in University’s Media platform; and (iii) excellence in education in terms of gaining in-depth subject knowledge aligned with progressive lifelong learning (deep learning).
The outcomes of this project have been disseminated through presenting a Poster (AdvanceHE2022_Alam_Poster [PDF 767KB]) at the Teaching and Learning Conference 2022 organised by Advance HE as well as delivering a talk at the UK-China Transnational Education (TNE) Conference 2022: Technology-Enhanced Teaching and Learning organised by the BUPT-QM Teaching and Learning Centre (JTLC).