Incorporating Video Lectures in Place of Class Lectures

Incorporating Video Lectures in Place of Class Lectures:

a teacher action research project on teaching English grammar in the adult ESL classroom.

John Duplice

American Language & Culture Institute

California State University, Chico

Introduction

Project Rationale:

            The problem I chose to address comes from a difficulty I have had in getting through the entire desired curriculum in a high intermediate level grammar class for young adult English language learners. The program the class is taught in is intensive English as a second language program for international students preparing to enter a public university in the United States. Our program has recently grown with a large population of students from Saudi Arabia. Before this influx of students from Saudi Arabia, our student population was primarily from East Asia. With the increase of new students the class sizes have nearly doubled and the culture and learning styles of the students has also become much more diverse. I quickly learned that Saudi students are much more vocal and eager to ask questions in class. While this increase of questions is very important and gratifying, it has caused a severe strain on class time.

            Over the past year I have found that the number of questions in class by the Saudi students has taken away a large portion of available lecture time. Consequently it has become much more difficult to include all of the desired material in the curriculum. In the past, I would teach the target material, answer a few questions, and then have the class work on a few problems to be reviewed during the same class. This would then be followed up by more questions and an introduction to the target material for the next class. With the recent increase of students the class would often be over before I answered all of the questions and would therefore not be able to have in class practice nor be able to introduce the next target material.

            This program uses Moodle online education software for homework assignments and communication between students and postings. During the middle of the term, I decided to start posting video lectures of the targeted materials onto Moodle for students to view before class for optional practice and preview. The goal was to allow students to be able to practice the homework assignments and review the video lectures as much as necessary on their own. I then taught the lecture in class with different examples than were provided in the videos. Following the class lectures I questioned the students in class on how well the videos helped. My findings were surprising in that the students who normally didn’t ask a lot of questions in class were very positive towards the home videos. The students who I had hoped would benefit the most, the Saudi students, didn’t seem to pay much attention to the at home videos and continued to ask the same questions during the class. I then wondered if the “optional” aspect of the videos was the problem.

 Review of the Literature:

            Over the past few years the number of classes being recorded and taught over the internet has increased greatly. There are numerous studies on how well students learn in an online vs. traditional classroom format. For my research question finding literature and recent studies was more difficult. This project focused on how the two formats work together. One well known example similar to the class method I used in this project is that of the Khan Academy’s online math curriculum used in some California public schools. In this example short math lessons are provided online for students to work through at their pace either at school or at home. The classroom is then used for answering specific questions and providing students with more of a one on one tutoring session in the teacher. (http://www.khanacademy.org/)  In a slightly dated paper from 2004 regarding the use of recorded mini lectures for English Language Learners, Roger Nunn and Darren Lingley of Kochi University discuss the aspect of teacher’s being able to focus on content and voice that is often lost during the live class environment. Nunn and Lingley explain, “The short duration of a mini-lecture obliges the teacher to be more conscious of content, vocabulary, pace and even style to help students better understand the lecture.” (Nunn and Lingley, 2004) This is very important for English Language Learners in that the instructor is able to assess how much the students are able to comprehend from the mini lecture. Although Nunn and Lingley focused on 5-10 minute lectures and the lectures in this project were usually around twice this length, the concept is basically the same.

 
Method

            Following this seven week term, I decided to form an action research project asking what results would come from posting the lectures online and requiring students to watch and complete homework practice before coming to class. The class time was not used for lectures, but simply for intense practice and further clarification. I made the rule that students must have watched the previous lecture and completed the required homework following the recorded lecture before they could ask questions on the material in class. Any student who did not complete the assignment would have to watch the video lecture and complete the homework without credit in class on one of the classroom computers. The goal of this short action research project was two-fold. First, I wanted to find out what would be the outcome on available class time and the amount of desired curriculum I would be able to cover in comparison to previous sessions. Second, I hope to use this class research project as a starting point for a much more in-depth and lengthy research project. I feel that the amount of data in this project isn’t enough to formulate a strong conclusion regarding the benefits or detriments of using recorded online videos as the main lecture. The future goal is to collect an entire year’s worth of data through five complete seven week sessions of the same grammar class. With this future data a more robust research project can be completed.

            The data collected in this initial seven week project consisted of end of class teacher journal notes, overall completed curriculum, test and quiz scores and an end of course student questionnaire. The end of class teacher journal notes focused on amount of time used on targeted curriculum in answering questions, number of students who did not complete the recorded lecture and homework assignment, and general observations on in class participation. Test and quiz scores were compiled and tallied as a class percentage for each section of the course and then at the end of the course as a whole. The course was broken into five main sections. These sections included; perfect tense review, noun clauses, gerunds and infinitives, adjective clauses, and adverb clauses. Each section received between three and four in class hours of work. The classes were 50 minutes taught on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays and lasted for a total of seven weeks. There were a total of 18 students in the grammar class. The students’ nationalities are illustrated in the following table.

Gathering Data:

           During the seven week class there were a few small problems that may have skewed the data. During the first week of the class a number of students moved up to the next level. There were also a few new students who joined the class during the second week. The 18 students in the table above were all in the class for at least six of the seven weeks.  In addition to the incoming and outgoing students of weeks one and two, the online class software we used, Moodle, was down for the first week and I was not able to implement the project and collect data for the perfect tense review part of the class. Moodle was back up and working from week two through the rest of the class without any problems. Data was therefore collected on noun clauses, gerunds and infinitives, adjective clauses, and adverb clauses.

            The first class meeting following the initial video lecture on noun clauses was not very productive as six students from Saudi Arabia and one student from Iran did not completely watch the video nor complete the assignment following the video. As the classroom only had three computers, I showed the video to the class as a whole. This took about 20 minutes of class time.  By giving the students who didn’t complete the homework a zero for the day, the problem of students not watching the video and coming to class without the homework completed mostly disappeared.

            The teacher journals offered good insight after they were gathered and reviewed at the end of the session. These only took a few minutes to complete each day of class and were done immediately following the end of the class.  The journals were written on the back of the daily lesson schedule and were therefore easy to evaluate in comparison to the daily lesson plan and objectives. The journals were the primary source of how much of the daily and weekly curriculum was covered and how much time was used for review, follow-up questions, and in class practice.

The end of session grade percentage was broken down into the following:

 End of Session Grading Percentages

The grades were calculated as a total class percentage. The exams consisted of similar questions as previous sessions, but scrambled to help prevent cheating by students from previous classes providing past tests. Furthermore, there were two different versions of each exam with the same questions, but in different order to help prevent “wandering eyes” and cheating.  There were two short 10 question fill in the blank quizzes, a 25 question mid-term, and a 25 question final exam. The mid-term and final exams consisted of fill-in questions, error correction questions, and multiple choice questions.

End of Session Test Grades for All Tests and Quizzes

Scores in the total class average are not broken down by nationality.

The tallied end of session questionnaire was given to all 18 students the class before the final exam. I illustrated to the students how to fill out the form and instructed them not to put their name on it and to turn it into the school office at the end of the course. Of the 18 questionnaires, 16 were turned in. Overall the attitude towards the online lectures was positive. The one area some students felt was lacking was the amount of questions and examples illustrated in the videos. There were six students who had a neutral or negative reaction to the number of questions illustrated in the videos. On average, three to four examples were worked out the instructor for each new grammar point taught in the video.

Tallied End of Session Student Questionnaire