This is the longer post promised earlier.
The idea for the re-organized lectures came to me at the end of Fall 2024 semester, when I thought about feedback from a few students who successfully completed that semester (holding multiple 1-on-1 meetings until they eventually met the standard for an A), that they did find the lectures helpful. From several years’ experience, I knew simply linking the lecture videos on an organized Canvas page wasn’t getting students to watch them (who knows what the reasons are; I have heard pretextual reasons before (like a student who claimed one particular early video was confusing and used that as a pretext to justify skipping all the rest); what I do know statistically is it’s a small minority of a given class that watches a majority of the lecture videos). Some students would skip to the homework help videos, which don’t help them learn as much as they think it might (… because they are reversing my advice, to watch the lecture videos and skip the homework help videos, at least until after trying the questions on their own). Anyways; I had a longer post for the motivation here: Winter 2024 Update – Lecture Videos
The projects for re-organizing lecture videos were an unqualified success—in fact, when I started putting together the course materials for Physics 4A (Spring 2025) using the re-organized lecture videos is when I saw the immense simplification it brought about, and that got me to change my mind about taking on a similar project for Physics 4C (Spring 2025, also), even though that meant a pretty substantial time commitment, non-negligible possibility of falling behind in posting course material, all for a course that I probably won’t teach again in a long time (if all goes well, we’ll be teaching Physics 3A in Spring 2026 and not Physics 4C). I think the simplification is best illustrated in below screenshots. The first screenshot is how a typical weekly sub-modules look in a Physics 4A class before the re-organization; the second screenshot is after re-organization.
Before re-organization, I had three assignments (conceptual questions, lecture reflection, and peer review) that were trying to be the “lecture assignment” (i.e. assignment tasks for the online asynchronous class that replicates/replaces the 4 hours per week of in-person lecture). And I had grown weary of these assignments (too many students were using ChatGPT on conceptual questions; very few students were doing peer reviews earnestly; most lecture reflection posts were basically “no comment” posts). Having that video-cued assessment meant I felt comfortable getting rid of the complex structure of those assignments, replacing them with the much simpler setup of lecture assessment and weekly problem set.
And I feel good about how the re-organized lecture videos came out. In the re-editing process, I taught myself a few things to improve board readability and make the lectures more watchable (“board aid” recording in worst cases; 3D transform to re-shape the wide-shot video; simultaneously displaying shots from left and right cameras, in those circumstances when I was writing in the transition area for the two cameras). And the self-imposed length restrictions (between 1 to 2 hours long, whenever possible, 2 videos per weekly module; sometimes one (1) when students had other tasks to complete that week, and on rare occasions three (3) when there are topics that I want to present, even if “optional”) gave me the right reason to cut out material that we could do without, while re-reviewing some of the older footage to see if they could be edited into usable material. Overall, the videos I have in the re-organized lecture videos playlists (Physics 4A in 30 Lectures and Physics 4C in 30 Lectures; BTW, I’m currently working on Physics 4B in 30 Lectures) are better quality than the videos I started out with. So, I just now unlisted most of the video clips that are in the re-organized lectures (exceptions were made for videos with high view counts), and the original “Physics 4A Lectures” and “Physics 4C Lectures” now only contain problem-solving videos and other lecture videos that didn’t make the cut, in these re-named playlists: Physics 4A Extra Lectures and Problem-Solving Videos and Physics 4C Extra Lectures and Problem-Solving Videos.
Finally, there is an added benefit that I didn’t anticipate and only started seeing once I was holding the required 1-on-1 meetings, particularly as I was completing the “due diligence check”: I now have metadata on which students are likely watching the lecture videos and who are not watching the lecture videos. Before, outside of information I get from the required 1-on-1 meeting (where I can easily tell who knows material covered in my lectures and who does not), I could only make rough guesses on whether students watch lecture videos, for example, by looking at the amount of time students spend on the course Canvas site (as reported in People tab). But the information source here was not very detailed nor very reliable (because it’s easy for a student to leave a web browser page open long enough on Canvas site to just accumulate the hours). The video-cued assessments being MyOpenMath assessment meant that these assessments come with the same detailed timestamp metadata that all MyOpenMath assessments come with. I can get actual time measurements for how long a student spent on a video-cued assessment and accurately categorize each assessment into one of three categories: (1) student likely watched the lecture video (amount of time spent is between 50% of video length and slightly longer than video length; 50% is easily explained by a student watching the video at 2x speed); (2) student likely did not watch the lecture video (amount of time spent is a hilariously low amount of time, like single-digit number of minutes); (3) unsure (mostly when thousands of minutes are recorded, usually resulting from the assessment being accessed over multiple days; for individual lecture assignments this probably isn’t indicative of anything bad, but I’ve come to believe that when all the lecture assignment timestamps look like this, it’s more likely than not that a student is not watching the lecture videos in good faith and are simply attempting to create normal-looking timestamps). On more than one occasion during the 1-on-1 meeting, this information came in useful, because when a student is confronted with (1) lack of their own knowledge of what is covered in lecture and (2) MyOpenMath timestamps showing how little time they spent on lecture assignments, even the most deceitful student has difficult time maintaining the lie (also, for what reason? I emphasize grade is determined on whether or not they can solve physics problems, not on whether they watch the lecture videos).
I’m currently mulling over a first-day presentation (to be used for Physics 4A in Fall 2025 and possibly for Physics 4B) in which to utilize some of this capability, where the main purpose of the presentation is to convince students (1) that it’s worth putting in the effort to learn how to solve physics problems and (2) that there is no other way to get a B or an A, because all the ways of cutting corners that may have worked in other online classes won’t work in this class.
P.S. Oh, and one last thing: YouTube watch statistics are better for these re-organized videos. CoA Physics channel’s watch hours are up by more than 35% in comparison with previous 365 days (I believe a majority of these hours are coming from people—members of the public—who just find these videos). While I’m primarily making the lecture videos for my students, but, hey, when the public watch hours exceed 3,000 hours (over 365 days), I can turn on monetization for the channel and see how that does.