What concepts are students still struggling with after lecture? How can I most effectively supplement lectures to enhance student learning? Will my efforts to provide additional resources actually pay off in terms of student success?
These key questions -- familiar to many instructors in large lecture courses -- structured Joanna Mirecki Millunchick’s teaching innovation in MSE (Materials and Science Engineering) 220. Because the course draws engineering majors with widely varying degrees of experience with course concepts, Professor Millunchick was especially interested in offering diverse students opportunities to review lecture topics and learn at a pace appropriate to their needs.
Her central innovation? Screencasts. Millunchick developed a range of screencasts (i.e., online videos of her computer screen, accompanied by audio) on topics students were struggling with. The screencasts included lecture recordings, explanations of homework, and exam solutions. In just one example of her creative use of technology, Millunchick used a tablet PC and stylus to record her process of drawing diagrams, producing videos that students could watch and review on their own schedule. CTools allowed her to keep track of which students used the screencasts and how often. And then she assessed the relation of these data to student success in the course.
She found, quite simply, that students who used her screencasts earned higher grades in the course, but the greatest gains were for those students who started with less familiarity with the topic. Read more »
Submitted by tbraun on Wed, 09/19/2012 - 9:09am
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Today's AnnArbor.com features a story about U-M faculty who are providing feedback on student writing via video. Using a technique called screencasting, instructors create a personalized video for each student paper. Free software records whatever is on the instructor's computer screen, along with their verbal comments, so instructors can open a student's paper, talk though its strengths, make suggestions for improvement, even pull up further resources on their computer screen, and then send the video directly to the student.