USING VIDEOS AT HIGHER EDUCATION: FLIPPED CLASSROOM, METHODOLOGIES AND SOME EXAMPLES

Current university teaching, as well as teaching at other educational levels, must confront a pressing problem in the classroom: lack of motivation and participation. This fact has been also a problem in the past, however nowadays the students were born in the digital era, so they can have many distractions and just wearing the smartphone at the classroom can be a difficult to concentrate in the teacher's talk. One way of improvement is the use of videos in teaching. The possibility of reaching students in a much more direct way than the traditional master class, thanks to the videos, is a very interesting way to improve their attention and participation. This paper analyzes the possibilities that video has in current university teaching. In addition, some practical examples have been made. Specifically, the creation of videos has been used through two ways of acting. 1) On the one hand, the creation of videos has been used to replace the traditional lecture and improve the attention of students. 2) On the other hand, videos have been proposed as homework for students to study, review concepts and prepare several practical sessions later in the classroom. In the first case, two videos were recorded replacing a face-to-face traditional lecture of one hour. The videos showed the same content as the lecture. The Screencast-o-matic application was used, which allows screen capture while recording the teacher's voice. The recording was made with the same presentation of the PowerPoint slides that the teacher would make at the classroom, with simultaneously recording of the voice with explanations on the same slides. The slides are the same that the teacher has provided to the students as the notes of the subject. The videos were uploaded to the YouTube platform and were watched during classroom hours, according to the planned schedule. All students had a computer and individual headphones. Each student could watch the videos and even repeat some less assimilated parts, in order to acquire the corresponding knowledge. The students were very concentrated practically all the time of the class and showed great interest in watching the videos. In the second case, several videos have been recorded for the student's homework, with the aim of preparing subsequent face-to-face classes of practical type. Each video contained an introduction to the corresponding planned practical activity, as well as different explanations related to it. It is a way for students, before the face-to-face practical class, to be prepared and maintain an adequate level of introduction to what they are going to work on. That allows them to be more focused and attentive to the activities to be carried out at the classroom. The teacher also can explain more in deep contents and concepts gaining in student's attention and motivation. With all these aims it was intended that the students had a material with the same content as the traditional classroom with an introduction and explanations related to practical classes, but available to see it as many times as they wanted and not only in class, but also at their own home. The videos were, therefore, available to students after classroom, who were able to view them from anywhere, with any device (PC, laptop, smartphone, tablet...) and at any time, especially for the final exam. Surveys were completed at the end of the semester and most of the students considered the experiences made interesting and positive. The experiences were very satisfactory: in the substitute video of the master class almost all the students were very concentrated in class practically all the time. In the case of practical activities, the students arrived at the classroom with adequate prior knowledge, which allowed, together with the completion of the test at the beginning of the practices, an improvement in the dynamics of class work and better attention, participation and assimilation of activities. The students valued all the experiences as interesting, being able to also have the contents from anywhere and at any time.