Exploring the explaining quality of physics online explanatory videos

Abstract

Explaining skills are among the most important skills educators possess. Those skills have also been researched in recent years. During the same period, another medium has additionally emerged and become a popular source of information for learners: online explanatory videos, chiefly from the online video sharing website YouTube. Their content and explaining quality remain to this day mostly unmonitored, as well is their educational impact in formal contexts such as schools or universities. In this study, a framework for explaining quality, which has emerged from surveying explaining skills in expert-novice face-to-face dialogues, was used to explore the explaining quality of such videos (36 YouTube explanatory videos on Kepler’s laws and 15 videos on Newton’s third law). The framework consists of 45 categories derived from physics education research that deal with explanation techniques. YouTube provides its own ‘quality measures’ based on surface features including ‘likes’, views, and comments for each video. The question is whether or not these measures provide valid information for educators and students if they have to decide which video to use. We compared the explaining quality with those measures. Our results suggest that there is a correlation between explaining quality and only one of these measures: the number of content-related comments.

Misconceptions in Physics Explainer Videos and the Illusion of Understanding: An Experimental Study

“…Despite their high potential, the quality of online explainer videos on YouTube greatly varies. According to Kulgemeyer and Peters (2016), there are numerous scientifically correct videos on YouTube, however, metrics such as "numbers of thumbs up / likes" provide no insight into the explanatory quality (in terms of comprehensibility) of the videos. That leads to a conflict of interest: Although students watch online explainer videos to learn about school topics, the main interest of large YouTube channels most likely is to generate "views" and "likes", both probably loosely correlated to their income.…”

“…That leads to a conflict of interest: Although students watch online explainer videos to learn about school topics, the main interest of large YouTube channels most likely is to generate "views" and "likes", both probably loosely correlated to their income. As neither "views" nor "likes" directly reflect the explanation quality, the video producers might focus on increasing the popularity of the videos instead of on a well-explained video (Kulgemeyer & Peters, 2016).…”

Articulated Video Production Between Teachers and Training Teachers as a Proposal for the Teaching of Modern and Contemporary Physics

“…So, the strategy going beyond the production of conventional reports and enable students to explore -in the process of preparing the videos -other elements of culture with imagination and creativity (Pereira et al, 2012). Moreover, the increased production of videos on channels such as Youtube has led to the search for quality criteria to support the choice of materials to be used by teachers (Kulgemeyer & Peters, 2016).…”

“…For effective learning, it is essential that the use of a video is followed by two steps: first, teachers need to assess understanding by asking questions and giving students the opportunity to ask questions on their own; second, teachers must prepare tasks that challenge their students with problems that need the information explained in the video (Kulgemeyer & Peters, 2016). Then, to deepen and validate the use of the videos, didactic sequences were elaborated to be used with high school students and applied in the classroom.…”

Del rigor a la retórica emocional. Comunicación y discurso educativo TEDTalk para el aula

“…No está entre los objetivos de este breve trabajo dirimir la complejidad de aspectos inherentes a la comunicación pública del conocimiento, al respecto se puede consultar abundante literatura y multitud de textos específicos sobre los cambios contemporáneos en las formas de difusión de la ciencia (Trench, 2007;Schäfer, 2009;Suleski y Ibaraki, 2010; Bennett y Jennings, 2011; Moreno-Castro, 2011; López-Pérez y Olvera-Lobo, 2016; López-Cantos, 2017) pero, en cualquier caso, es indudable la utilidad de los contenidos audiovisuales para la enseñanza tal como se muestra en numerosos trabajos desde hace décadas (Bravo Ramos, 1996;Bartolomé, 2003), y su eficacia didáctica en el actual entorno online (Meseguer-Martínez, Ros-Gálvez y Rosa-García, 2017) y para la divulgación científica (Allgaier, 2013), así como la demostrada capacidad didáctica en diversos ámbitos educativos que tiene la plataforma Youtube (Desmet, 2009;Jones y Cuthrell, 2011;Jaffar, 2012;Kulgemeyer y Peters, 2016) o las posibilidades que ofrece el video online para desarrollar novedosas estrategias docentes utilizando herramientas colaborativas (McClean et al, 2016).…”