Practical preparation videos on a zero Rand budget

Due to limited equipment and laboratory space for practicals, students only have a relatively short time to complete their weekly practical. In this time they need to familiarise themselves with the apparatus that they are going to be using, carry out the experimental procedure, and obtain and interpret all the expected results. Their practical manual is comprehensive enough for them to prepare adequately for a practical session. But with the addition of a preparation video to supplement the practical guidebook, the hope was that students would arrive at a practical already familiar with the apparatus and with a clearer idea of what they are going to have to do. A video would also help cater for students with different types of learning methods, in line with universal design for learning. The project was undertaken to produce videos for half of our first semester second year practicals at The University of the Free State. No money was spent buying equipment or software, nor to pay professionals for their services. The assigned demonstrators for each practical were given the task to write the script for and present the video for their own practical. Evaluation of the effect of the videos were done by comparing the students’ experience and marks with two other groups. These are the practicals from the previous year, where all the practicals were presented in the same way, but none of them had introductory videos, and also to half of the current year’s practicals which did not have videos. The demonstrators also gave feedback on their experience, each of them were responsible for two practicals this year, one of them we made an introductory video for and the other we did not.