Response to Benjamin E Schreiber article

Response to Benjamin E Schreiber Live lecture versus video podcast in undergraduate medical education

I went a little overboard with the length of this post, it should be just one paragraph.

This study measures students’ knowledge and recall after participating in a video podcast and live lecture. Schreiber measures qualitative data and personal assessments of the two mediums. The study finds that students perform about equally in either teaching medium. Some concerns of the video lecture were that it was not interactive, but students appreciated the utilities of video lectures such as pausing and reviewing.
It is promising that, at this juncture, studies show that video podcasts rate similarly to live lectures. Video casting is relatively easy with a set of slides and an audio track, and has shown to be equally effective and accepted by students. There is significant room for improvement by targeted production improvements intended to improve the utility of educational multimedia. Several organizations are employing multimedia in education that improve upon and mitigate many of the shortcomings associated with faculty produced video casts. These implementations may improve the utility of educational multimedia through several methods including holding the listeners’ attention longer, and employing adaptive testing to improve interactivity and comprehension. A common strategy utilizes video artifacts to capture and guide the listener’s imagination to better engage the student; this may lead to a superior learning experience.







As technologies emerge, we often fail to effectively leverage and integrate these technologies, often in spite of the presence of established knowledge and expertise. That is to say that there is a lag between the emergence of a technology and its effective use. At this time, there is a wide gap between professional educational video and the video content authored by faculty. Certainly, the production quality of professional organizations is out of scope for most educators, but one can argue that with reasonable resources, we can accomplish far more than simple video casts. Faculty is quite proficient at delivering live lectures and is well familiar with the live context. However, as video casting is still new, best practices in teaching strategies have not yet been employed. One possibility of making higher quality video production available to the masses may be similar to the efforts employed to break down the barriers of creating professional websites. For people with limited or no experience creating a traditional website, many alternatives are available. These do-it-yourself sites leverage templates which incorporate best practices and professional design. These generic sites are far cheaper to create and consume less time. The downsides are the sacrifices that must be made to certain customizations and intended features that are not supported. In the same way, educational video production software and skillsets may evolve to the point where a framework that facilitates quality video production and best practices.
One point that Schreiber’s study makes is that students did not like that the video lecture because it was not interactive; they could not ask questions. A skill professors have that have taught the same class for many years is the insight to anticipate the questions that students will have. Faculty may also have the insight as to which areas students are more challenged. Therefore, skilled and seasoned lecturers often give amazingly effective lectures. Lectures for commonly taught classes may be better suited for video casting. These lectures may produce an improved return for investments of advanced video production resources. Additionally, incorporating adaptive testing into educational multimedia may also mitigate the issues with interactivity to provide a better learning experience. After completing the core multimedia learning component, an adaptive testing module can test the student’s comprehension of the material. The software can present the student with ancillary material/modules targeted specifically to the areas where the student needs improvement. Regardless of the possible measures that may be employed, we have not effectively leveraged video casting with existing technology and knowledge in the educational arena.