Contributed by Arts and Social Sciences Digital Uplift Team, PVC(E)
Interview-style videos with industry professionals have been adopted as a practice of connecting students with industry. Traditionally, a course authority decides who to interview in the industry, what to ask and where to place this interview resource. This top-down approach of producing teaching material focuses more on the content than the balance of content and delivery. Students might be trapped in overloading information and end up learning surface level knowledge instead of the competences that both course and program set for them. On the other hand, a bottom-up approach to create interview videos, in which the convenor asks students who to interview and what to ask, might not be structured enough to connect to CLOs and PLOs. Many Digital Uplift projects produced interview style videos in either top-down or bottom-up manner. However, this raises some questions, such as: What is the shelf life of these videos? Why do some interview style videos sound rigid? How can interview style videos help students achieve other course tasks? To address these, the Arts & Social Sciences team of PVC(E) would like to propose a middle-out approach where opinions are collected from students, patterned by teaching staff, and the content of video is tightly linked to an assessment activity that is also aligned with CLOs.
Resources for learning need to invite students to learn with them, not from them (Churchill, King, & Fox, 2013). EDST5117 Professional Inquiry is a postgraduate course for pre-service teachers who are required to conduct Action Research on their teaching practice for further improvement. The old design was to require students to read required readings and share opinions online (as a required activity) before the submission of their essay with Action Research. While the essay activity could connect student from CLOs to some analytical PLOs of Master of Teaching (Secondary) (e.g. Critically evaluate and respond to a range of issues in education nationally and internationally) , the Arts team wishes to create a video resource before the implementation of essay activity to help students connect with some PLOs with soft skill elements (e.g., Engage professionally and ethically with colleagues, parents/carers and the community to communicate and lead change).
Mayer’s (2001, p. 188) personalization effect pointed out that students learn better when the multimedia materials are in conversational style rather than formal and scripted style. Mayer (2001: p. 165) also introduced the importance of domain-specific knowledge, the prior knowledge of a specific subject, in the learning of text-based knowledge. The students in EDST5117 have bachelor’s degree in Education and practicum experience as secondary school teacher. Therefore, they do have a certain level of knowledge with regard to the situations at classroom, school and community level. The resource (the interview video) is designed to help them resonate with their experiences so they could apply Action Research to the analysis and improvement of teaching practices.
The team started from Moodleroom forum. All students were required to post once and reply once about the challenges they had faced during practicum. Moodleroom forum allows exports texts, which helps the analysis with Nvivo later.
We then used Nvivo (a tool for qualitative data analysis) to pattern prominent themes. This first round of coded data shaped the questions that we needed to ask in interview. The team invited PVCE Media team members to help map out the questions and ensure that the questions are gradually built up. The more built-up the questions are, the more interactive we can expect from the video.
To capture genuine feelings of being first-year teachers, we did not let the interviewees know the exact questions we were asking. The interviewee only knew a general direction of the interview. This video resource is placed two weeks before the submission of their Action Research proposal. The raw videos are about 100 minutes. The team collaborated with the course authority to edit them down to 14 minutes long where four interviewees shared their teaching challenges at personal and professional level, and how they analyzed the challenges and overcame them.
References Churchill, D., King, M., & Fox, B. (2013). Learning Design for Science Education in the 21st Century. Journal of the Institute for Educational Research, 45(4), 404-421. doi:10.2298/ZIPI1302404C Mayer, E. R. (2001). Multimedia learning. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.