Introduction Of Video Journals And Archives In The Classroom

We report on two innovative approaches of using video recordings in project-based courses targeted at journaling student and team performance and project progression. The first approach is strictly managed by instructors and staff, and involves periodical recording of student presentations, which are made available to students for self and peer evaluation. The second approach is loosely managed by students, granting them artistic benefit to journal their projects’ progression and team dynamics. We report on the successes and shortcomings of interacting with video in the classroom, and introduce our research and studies done in this field. In this paper, we focus on the use of video in a large introductory engineering design course centered on project-based work performed in student teams. Student projects span a wide range of categories, for example, designing equipment for the disabled, building web sites, and developing architectural layouts for lab spaces. Projects are typically completed for not-for-profit organizations and are always aligned with a real client, who initiates the project. Students present on their progress to the client and the class twice a semester: once during a preliminary design review and once for the final project completion. Midterm and final presentations are videotaped by the instructional staff in a typical classroom environment. During the semester, teams conduct frequent informal meetings to discuss their progress, and are required to meet with their client at least once. At subjectively selected times, students record these events as part of their video journal. At the end of the semester, teams summarize their team and client interaction in an edited version of the footage. Our engineering design course is offered to more than 150 students per semester, who are assigned to teams of 5-6 students. Inarguably, the introduction of interactive video requires extensive resources and places a high burden on the staff. Libraries of video recordings grow quickly, as does the need for students and instructors to locate video material without laborious manual search. Presentations must be disseminated quickly and effectively, while providing reasonable methods of searching the multi-modal material. Midterm presentation footage is particularly important for students to review their performance, while final presentations are interesting for future students to learn about completed projects. In this paper, we discuss the positive and negative implications of using video in classrooms, and how students have overall benefited from the video archives. While presentation videos have proven to enhance student learning, video journals have in many ways distracted attention from the primary goal of the class. Our focus in this paper is a large engineering course, yet neither size nor subject inhibit our approach from finding application elsewhere. Similarly, the research we present for working with video archives is generally applicable in other classroom environments. We show how we have designed and evaluated a multimedia browser (VAST MM = Video Audio Structure Text MultiMedia Browser) to address seamless audio-visual recording and dissemination in a typical engineering classroom.