Videos with hands: an analysis of usage and interactions of undergraduate science students for acquiring physics knowledge

Abstract

Videos created with the hands of teachers filmed have been perceived as useful educational resource for students of Physics in undergraduate courses. In previous works, we analyzed the students’ perception about educational videos by asking them about their experiences. In this work, we analyze the same facts, but from a learning analytics perspective, by analyzing the interactions that students have with the videos during their learning experience. With this analysis, we obtain how students behave and may compare whether their behavior aligns with the perceptions obtained from previous research. The data analyzed in this work corresponds to the students’ interactions with educational videos during 5 semesters in two different courses of Physics within online degrees of Telecommunication and Computer Science. It has been found that the topic taught in the videos has influence in the way videos are used by the students. Regarding the type of content (theory or problem-solving), problem-solving videos are more used by students, although interactions with both videos are similar. This difference differs with previous results based on students’ perception. The contribution of the paper is to provide more ground and knowledge about the way the educational videos are consumed in Physics courses. The new knowledge can be used to improve the way videos are incorporated within courses and, therefore, to improve the student learning experiences.