Student Video-Usage in Introductory Engineering Courses

As videos are gaining popularity in flipped and blended Engineering classrooms, there is an increasing need to track and understand students’ use of the videos, in order to identify evidence-based practices matched to the emerging trends in video and video annotation tools. We explore students’ surveyresponses, follow-up interviews, and log data from their interaction with common video platforms as well as, ViDeX, a new experimental video annotation tool, to evaluate how, when and why students watch, rewatch, and annotate videos in two large introductory Engineering courses, with flipped, and blended formats. Our findings show that students watch thevideos with the instructors’ intended use in mind, and plan their review process accordingly. In the flipped classroom, most students summarized the short preclass screencasts in their personal notes to minimize the need to re-watch the videos before the exam. In contrast, students in the blended  classroom reexamined the long tutorial videos mostly to redo the problems before the midterm and final exams. Bookmarking seemed to be useful for locating those problems of interest. Since the problems required drawings and computations, paper annotation was more beneficial than a dedicated video annotation platform.