From left to right, Rania Al-Hammoud, Wayne Brodland, Antonina Joukova and Kristin Wilson surround a frame from one of the videos created through their LITE grant project.
Grant recipients: Wayne Brodland, Rania Al-Hammoud, and Kayleanna Giesigner, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
(Project timeline: March 2017 - February 2019)
Description
In CIVE 104 (Mechanics) students participate in several hands-on classroom activities to promote experiential learning and to inhibit memory decay. Each activity addresses a fundamental concept, such as how arches work, or the importance of construction order. Unfortunately, students have time to experience only 2 of the 7 custom activities. We propose to develop videos of 3 to 5 minute duration that parallel the key steps in the activities so students can experience them vicariously. The goal of the videos will be to promote increased learning efficiency, reflective learning and memory retention. The effectiveness of the videos will be assessed through quiz-like questionnaires before any activities are done, after they have done their two assigned activities, after they have viewed the videos and when they are in an upper year. The current class has not benefited from the videos and will serve as a control.
So far the project has produced YouTube-style videos that allow students around the world access to the custom hands-on learning models that Dr. Brodland developed so students could build and learn about suspension bridges, arches, cathedrals and other structures. The videos allow students to experience these models vicariously. Year two of the grant will assess the effectiveness of the videos in producing student learning.
Research Questions Investigated
Instructional videos were developed to provide students with an alternative way to understand each of the models and their related concepts. The videos are also used as a teaching approach to show students how mechanics concepts are applied. Learning takes place through a combination of observational learning, experiential learning, activity preparedness, and reflective learning. Upon completion of two out of the seven activities, the students were shown one of the videos during class and guided to the rest of the video series to watch on their own. Students were able to gain greater perspective on the activities they participated in. For those activities they were unable to interact with, they had the opportunity to learn about the same concepts through an alternative but comparable experience. Thus, all students were able to utilize a unique resource to improve their understanding of the material in ways that could not be achieved during lectures or tutorials.
Findings/Insights
The study of the videos’ overall success was carried out primarily by means of a comprehensive subjective survey sent to students after they watched the videos. The survey asked for their overall thoughts, how they found the video quality, about the ways in which the videos improved their learning, and for them to rate their knowledge on a series of key concepts covered by the videos. View counts for each of the videos over the period of study were also examined to gain an understanding of student participation. Positive results found for both measures demonstrate the effectiveness of the various techniques incorporated into the videos and their success as an additional learning tool in a first year mechanics course.
Impact of the Project
The videos developed became an essential part of teaching the first year mechanics course. We reflect on these videos when we do the assessments for the students.
Furthermore, this project gained a lot of acceptance nationally and internationally, and have been receiving a lot of good feedback and comments from people around the world. Being part of this project helped us value more of the online portion of education and figure out more ways of incorporating more videos/online material into our teaching.
After presenting at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) conference, a lot of people connected to gain access of the videos as they saw a lot of value in them. That said, this grant helped make this all possible.
References
Project Reference List (PDF)