In the student survey I posted about last week, one of my students mentioned having a difficult time accessing the homework videos through YouTube on her Smart Phone. I had the videos set to semi-private (only accessible with a link) since I embedded them onto our class web-site, Edmodo. As much as I dislike the idea of my video lectures being public on YouTube, I did it for my students!
This past week students were assigned a homework lecture on Human Heredity. They were informed that there would be a quiz over the information on the day their notes were due and that they could use their notes on the quiz. Students were given the usual one week time frame to complete the assignment.
My General Biology students had a participation rate of 34% (34 out of 99) and my Practical Biology students only had a return rate of .04% (1 out of 28). This averages out to a 28% participation rate for the week. It does appear that a quiz over the video seems to be a motivating factor for about 34% of my General Biology students but not much of one for my Practical Biology students.
I find it interesting that in the 5 weeks I’ve been assigning video lectures, I have yet to get a higher than 39% participation rate. It’s frustrating because I can see the benefits for the students that do participate. I also hear so much about the many teachers having success with this Flipped Classroom model, but in my classes the students just don’t want to put in the time to watch a 6 to 8 minute video lecture as homework. I wonder if it’s because I am only semi-flipping? Perhaps if students had videos to watch everyday rather than only once a week my results would be different.
Did you notice if your students were copying each other's notes to make it look like they actually had watched the videos? I fear this will happen in my class.
ReplyDeleteMy students know I have a no tolerance policy for copying/cheating. Unless they go to a lot of effort to change the notes into their own words then I will find out. If they go to that much effort to change the notes then I probably won't know and they will have had to digest some of the information. To be honest, I never had that problem.
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