This past fall semester, I tried something different with the virtual class session videos, processing them during the semester week-by-week. It did work out pretty well, as a task to be done over the weekend (and the video uploaded early next week). They are in the usual playlists, for now at the end of the list (to be moved into the right place when I update the Canvas shells in a few weeks): Physics 4A playlist and Physics 4B playlist.
Now, for something completely new: towards the end of the last semester, I thought to take on a project that addresses a couple chronic issues when it comes to lecture videos. The first is a feedback I have gotten a few times regarding the length and the organization of the videos, boiling down to some students wishing that they were put into one long video instead of broken into clips the way they are now. The 10 to 20-minute video clip made sense before YouTube videos had chapters, but, well, now they have chapters, so an hour to two-hour long video can be pretty navigable (and allow students to watch a whole set of lectures through without interruption).
The second is the more serious issue: very few students watch the lecture videos. Which is challenging and regrettable, because the feedback I get from the few students who do put in the time to watch the lecture videos (and I don’t mean people who just skip to the homework help videos) is that they do learn from the videos. For vast majority of students who end the class with C (because they didn’t learn to apply any physics problem-solving techniques), what I see has been that they barely put in any time into watching the lecture videos. Some never started watching; others started watching but found one or two minor issue with one early video as an excuse to not watch the rest of the videos.
The homework system I use, MyOpenMath, does have an assignment setup that might address this issue, called “video-cued assessment,” and the project I took on is to collect the lecture videos into sets of about 1 hour in length each (some of them maybe up to 1.5 hours; never longer than 2 hours), both to standardize their presentation (and re-edit some clips that need better color balancing, etc.) and to use as basis for the video-cued assessment.
In terms of effectiveness of this approach (will more students watch lecture videos?) I’ll need to see in Spring 2025. In the meantime, the videos I am putting together (I’ve done 10 of 30 so far and have uploaded 4 of them; the rest are on daily—workdaily—release schedule) are in this playlist: Physics 4A in 30 Lectures.