Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 8 | Page 22

22 | JADE
ARTICLE #2 | 23
CARLOS TURRO, IGNACIO DESPUJOL & JAIME BUSQUETS
In the 2015-2016 academic term UPV moved a step forward in
applying Flipped Teaching to its courses, by planning a large-scale
deployment of more than 100 courses with around 200 teachers
involved. Teaching is done on two semesters, and for the first
semester 45 courses were flipped.
In our case we define the flipped classroom as an educational
technique that consists of two parts: computer-based individual
instruction before the lecture session and interactive group learning
activities inside the classroom in the time that was set up for lecturing
in standard courses. It’s worth noting that we don’t restrict this
definition to employ videos as an outside of the classroom activity.
Teachers that apply for the flipped teaching project have a learning
session in which they get the directions to apply the methodology in
their courses. However, while they are encouraged to use videos they
are allowed not to do it and rely in more conventional techniques like
HTML content on the University’s LMS platform or even PDF files.
Nearly half of the teachers decided not to use videos and stick with
that semi-traditional approach.
So we can classify the courses because of why they are distributing
the previous content in 5 different groups, belonging to two main
families: video and non-video. Usually video supported courses also
include HTML and PDF content.
Video family includes three types:
Screencasts (Homemade
recordings made by the teacher commenting the slides and teacher’s
computer desktop), Polimedia and Other Videos, and Non-video
family includes courses with only HTML or PDF content.
The 2015-2016 experience, in the first semester, got evaluated 45
Flipped Teaching courses, with 2668 students involved.
In order to evaluate the experience we did an anonymous survey
to the students of those courses, divided by courses. The survey
included a broad number of questions, some related to the a priori
learning beliefs of the students, some to the overall structure of the
experience and finally on the students’ perception on the value of
the Flipped methodology.
While there is quite information in the survey, we use a question
(Q8: I’m very satisfied with this experience/methodology) as a proxy
estimator for students’ satisfaction.
This can be compared perceived value of the students, the results
that we get from that by type of content is depicted on Table 5.
A CASE STUDY IN LARGE SCALE VIDEO RECORDING USING OPENCAST
Family
Video
Non video
Type
Number
of courses
Enrolled
students
Mean
(1..5)
Sigma Median
(1..5) Mean
(1..100 value)
77%
Screencast 4 234 4,06 0,70 4,30 Studio recordings
(Polimedia) 21 1308 3,98 0,67 4,08 74%
Other videos 4 221 3,32 0,73 3,41 58%
Only HTML content 14 657 3,27 0,77 3,26 57%
2 248 3,25 0,74 3,19 56%
45 2668
Only PDF files
Total
Table 2. Perceived value of Flipped Learning
This table clearly shows a great difference between video and non-
video supported Flipped Teaching. Acceptance rates for non-video
are just fair, that means that video should be a must in considering
these experiences.
Also there are no significant differences between the videos recorded
by the teachers themselves and the studio recordings. Our guess is
that while the recorded videos are of more visual quality, they lack
the capacity of be changed during the learning course, so in the
Screencast paradigm, teachers can adapt faster to students’ needs.
In any case, this is a topic that calls for further investigation.
In some courses of the experience we had the situation that we
have some groups using Flipped Teaching and some not, because
they had different teachers. However, the assessment was common,
so we can compare the assessment in using Flipped Teaching and
not using it. Such results are depicted on Figure 2 and show better
assessments from the Flipped students.
Conclusions
We have presented a case study on how the Opencast lecture
capture system can be applied to enhancing teaching in a higher
educational institution. Results show that having lecture recording
available is not only an opinion of the students, but it carries out
better performance.
Opencast also can be used to help teachers to create content for
other methodologies, as is our case regarding the Flipped Teaching
experience we are carrying on.