Info for Participants

The aim of our research is to assess the impact of a novel style of laboratory video. The video style, referred to as the "Tasty" style in this research, is characterised by being shot from the first person perspective, at a fast pace, with no audio narration. Research in the literature has established the benefits of videos using first-person perspective, however there is very little research on this particular video style in a Higher Education context, or specifically for engineering disciplines.

We are interested in the benefits for students and staff of this video style.

For students, we are aiming to answer the following research questions:

1. Do students engage more with "Tasty-style" laboratory videos compared to traditional videos, and why? 

• To answer this, we look at the total number of views of each video, number of unique viewers, and completion rates for the videos (what percentage of the video viewers watch).

2. Which students might benefit most from the "Tasty-style" laboratory video? 

• We aim to achieve this by comparing different cohorts of students. For example, we have trialled this video style with Foundation Year engineers, who are predominantly home students, and Masters-level engineers, who are predominantly international students. We have also tried this video style with the entire cohort of First Year Engineers. Feedback so far has been very positive, and therefore we intend to continue the research with other modules. By studying the impact of changing to this video style across multiple cohorts and disciplines, we hope to identify which students might benefit most.

3. Does the "Tasty" style change how students engage with videos? 

• For this question we use the anonymised summary of the type of device used to view the video (desktop, mobile or tablet). By comparing with a module that hasn't changed video style, we can assess whether students are choosing to engage with these videos differently - for example, if there is an increase to views from tablets or smartphones, this might indicate students are watching the videos in the lab or 'on the go'. Using a desktop would suggest they are watching the videos at home or in a library.

Now that we have established that students find this research style beneficial, we are expanding our research to cover the benefits for staff. For staff, we are interested in finding out:

• What challenges are there for implementing this video style?

• What benefits are there to implementing this video style (compared to other video styles)?

• What resources would support staff to try this video style?

• Are these videos an effective resource for training other staff (for example, GTA training for laboratory demonstrators)?

Although Kaltura Media does collect information on individual viewing behaviours, we do not access this information as part of this project!

With class sizes of at least 50 students, we are confident that no individual can be identified from their viewing behaviour.

One limitation of the data is that we don't know how many of the views come from staff versus students. However, in most cases, the number of students vastly outnumbers the number of staff. 

Similarly, the analytics do not distinguish between internal and external viewers (i.e. viewers from outside the University of Sheffield). To mitigate this, we use separate links for any videos we have made public, for example via blog posts or this website. This enables us to keep our student and staff analytics separate from any external viewer analytics. This also helps us assess the impact of our external engagement efforts (such as this website!).

We are investigating whether this novel style of video is beneficial for student engagement and learning. In the Diamond, we are always innovating and finding ways to improve the quality of our educational resources. We anticipate this style of video might be more engaging and accessible for students. It may also change the way students interact with video resources, for example enabling them to watch videos in the lab without disturbing others.

We will disseminate the findings of our research on this website, in blog posts, conferences, workshops and peer-reviewed papers. This will enable other Engineering Education practitioners to learn from our findings.

The video style is also fairly straight-forward for teaching staff to adopt. As audio isn't required, the video can be recorded even whilst other things are going on in the lab. It also means we don't have to watch or listen to ourselves when editing the videos! We anticipate the main barrier being the time taken to learn how to edit the videos. Part of our solution to this is to develop resources, which we will disseminate on this website, to help staff use this video style. We may collect data in future about how many staff have accessed the resources (i.e. views on staff training videos), and whether or not they found them useful (via anonymised surveys). This will help us to assess the impact of the resources and continue improving the resources.

We cannot remove your individual viewing data from our dataset. This is because the aggregated video analytics data we use are already anonymised.

As we are using anonymised aggregated data which poses minimal risks to the subjects, we are not required to obtain "informed consent". However, we are still keen to keep people informed about how we are using the data. We will keep this website updated with our latest case studies and research plans!

Similarly, if you are asked to complete an anonymous survey, we will not be able to remove your responses once you have clicked Submit. This information will be provided on the survey.