Student usage of videos containing worked solutions

Abstract

During a prior course offering, a tablet PC was used to generate videos of worked solutions to tutorial problems. This was found to be effective for engaging distance-education students who do not have the capability of attending regular tutorial classes. The benefits of the videos come from the solutions being hand-written on the tablet PC screen while the tutor spoke about the problem. The usage of hand-writing brings a sense of humanity to the solutions, while the audio stream contains a higher information density, thereby enabling background information to be conveyed more thoroughly and substeps described. For the next offering of the course, these videos were made available to the students before the semester began, rather than as the semester progressed. The current study assesses how the students have utilised this tool and how their study behaviour may have changed by having access to the videos throughout the course.