Covid Anniversary Blog

A year ago, in March 2020, we saw a global adoption of an online video-based learning approach in the higher education sector as a strategy to flatten the curve of COVID-19 infection and to prevent person-to-person transmission around university campuses.

Since then, we’ve found ourselves switching between online and blended learning to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 restrictions on students’ higher education experience. However, most educators still retain the use of video-based learning to support in-person instruction and more importantly, to offer greater flexibility to students who are forced to stay at home on medical grounds.

Many have postulated that video-based learning is here to stay in this new era of learning. It is not easy to turn back to the traditional face-to-face teaching model when both educators and learners have been provided a glimpse of the future and experienced the convenience and the flexibility of video-based learning.

Video-based education supports the context of ubiquitous learning, allowing students to learn at anytime and anywhere. This means that students can take fuller control over their learning journey, with the options to review, rewind, and revisit any part of the video whenever needed. This is in fact, a tangible benefit to students who have additional childcare responsibilities or family duties.

Nevertheless, even with the flexibility that video-learning can offer, many are concerned about the lack of guidance and interaction between instructors and students in a virtual video-based learning environment. There is often an underlying assumption that a face-to-face lecture is more superior to online video-based learning due to the fact of having teacher-student direct interaction, which may be scarce or even not present with remote video-learning. Without the physical presence of an instructor, video-based learning requires much more self-discipline and self-motivation from students to stay away from distractions while learning and to seek support when needed.

But, the problem is often the solution. In the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a renewed interest in video-based research with a strong emphasis to improve student engagement and learning experience. Pedagogical strategies that have been found effective in the past, such as peer coaching have been brought back and incorporated into video-based lessons to encourage knowledge exchange and to influence students’ motivation in learning. Different video styles and presentation platforms have been explored and compared to develop best practices in video-based learning that not only produced videos which motivate students to watch again, but also raise learning outcomes. The option to follow up a video with a brief online assessment may also provide educators more opportunities to gauge students’ level of performance and offer individualised feedback, which we know is a powerful key.

Video-based learning should not be seen as a quick-fix for COVID-19. While we observe an important transformation to remote learning at the dawn of a new learning era, perhaps listening to what students are saying about their experiences and documenting what is working and what is not will help us to find creative solutions in addressing and improving the learning experience in the future.

Angel Tan is a PhD Student in the Department of Psychology at Edge Hill University. This piece is written as a follow-up to a post originally published in the COVID-19 blog on 27th May 2020 by Angel which can be found here.

Image by Joseph Mucira from Pixabay