How making videos changed my dismissive view of PBL

Flip flop

In 2015, I taught at an education institution that trained future high school math teachers. Since we were asking our students to be Modern Teachers, we felt morally obligated to do some innovative teaching ourselves, too. My primary experience with innovative teaching happened in one class, which I flipped. Instead of lecturing, I made explanatory videos and turned the class meetings into meetings where students did exercises and asked questions. I diligently prepared my videos by making slides, practice runs, and a bit of video post-editing. Very, very time-consuming.

When the class finally took off, the students bombarded me with questions. Instead of working on exercises as anticipated, the class meetings became more like lectures, where I found myself explaining everything again because students were not used to working with videos. It was very nice that I wanted to flip, but the students did not. So, instead of flipping, the class flopped. For me, this experiment later turned out to be an important learning experience.

The Pandemic

Oh yes, we all remember that. Teachers suddenly had to become adept at online teaching, parents suddenly had to endure their kids joining class at home, and it took 10 months to get a new dishwasher delivered (much to my chagrin). Like many colleagues, I was teaching online and making videos again. I was the most experienced in this task in my department, due to the 2015 flipped classroom bout mentioned above, and I began to do it "quick and dirty" as there was absolutely no time to make slides. Also important: students got used to this method of receiving education, consisting of watching videos by themselves. They changed...

PBL and Algebra

Before coming to UM, I was aware of PBL education or variants, though not always under the same name. At first, I thought nothing special about PBL or its underlying CCCS principles. I just thought of it as another thing “to satisfy the education researchers”, of whom I wasn’t one. However, my perspective changed when I started teaching a linear algebra course for Business and Engineering, and that’s the story I’m telling here.

The Incentive

In this course, I was confronted with the following problem: The course came with only one weekly lecture, whereas all courses I taught at my department included two or three weekly lectures. From what I could see, I had to cover too much material every week for one lecture to be easily digestible.

I mean, it was definitely possible to cram all the material into one two-hour lecture – and from what I heard from the students, this often happened in other courses – but this option wouldn't make the learning experience very easy for the students.

I decided to complement the lectures with videos: the videos would contain the content material I would not cover in the lecture – and would not contain the material presented during the lectures. (This latter aspect was required as the department wanted students to attend the lectures and not receive all the content in the videos – which makes sense.) For each lecture, it was more or less natural (to me) what to teach in the lecture and what to put in the video.

Initially, I feared this would be a lot of work, but as it turned out, I could make "quick and dirty" videos of reasonable quality very efficiently. I estimate that it cost me about two to three times as much time as it took to play the video at average speed. Also, the videos turned out to be relatively short and compact. (See my second article to find out "How to quickly make videos that get 'The Job Done'.)

Next to that, I had to make do with the double tutorials per week.

It turned out to be surprisingly FUN!?!

Why is that? I was designing a course in a creative way; the scheme on how to let students learn suddenly was way more "open" than in "regular" classroom teaching as I was used to from other universities. It was a strange sensation to realise that I was recognising some of the theoretical concepts from PBL in a practical situation. Because I had more tutorials, taking a more PBL-like approach was almost automatic. I didn't go all the way with it, but as the weeks went on, it became more and more natural to apply PBL and the "collaborative" part of CCCS.

It also unearthed "new" difficulties: for example, I "only" gave 4 out of 26 (from 13 groups x 2) weekly tutorials myself, and it was necessary also to instruct the other tutors, who had diverse expertise and experience. This was quite a challenge, and I wouldn't say I 100% succeeded. Some of the tutors were professional tutors (and better than me) to whom I didn't even need to throw the ball for them to catch it, whereas, with others, I only noticed way too late in the course that the students were struggling. I sent out instructions through email weekly, thinking that that would be enough. I now know I will need to meet weekly if at least online, to discuss that week's tutorials.

As time passed, I saw that I was naturally and concretely doing stuff propagated in PBL and CCCS, but simply coming from me. It caught me off-guard, as I'm now quite enthusiastic about this, and I look forward to expanding this in future courses. It also made me think: all universities I have worked for so far claimed to be teaching-oriented, but as far as I see it, they're nowhere near UM.

I started realising that UM puts way more resources into teaching personnel  – as PBL is teaching-intensive. For example, there are dedicated professional tutors here who are really, really good – shoutout to my bros Prag Mehta and Ioannis Diamantis! And I think it pays off! I really get enthusiastic about this as I see how much it benefits the students, and – again – it is so much fun.

"The videos get the job done"

I asked students a few times what they thought of this setup. Obviously, they were happy with having part of the material in videos, if only because they could watch them at their own pace, in their own time, and could rewatch things. They never mentioned “speeding up”, but I imagine that can be done too. They were sort of OK with the fact that not everything was in videos and that the lectures contained material that could not be found in videos.

A few students said they would rather have had an additional lecture than videos. The visual and auditory quality of the videos was OK for them. A few mentioned that videos could have been smoother or slicker – while recognising that “they do get the job done”. Overall, the response was very positive.

Interactive, Constructive and Collaborative learning

Let me not shy away from the theoretical aspect and spend a few words on the CCCS principles here. The PBL educational design for this course could be found in several of its elements. The autonomous watching of videos by students connects to the S of CCCS (Self-directed). I could make the tutorials more interactive, which better put the first and third C of CCCS (Constructive and Collaborative learning) on the map.

For instance, more examples and questions were discussed with the tutorial groups as a whole, and there was more room for students to work out exercises in front of their peers, making very instructive errors. Students who were not at the front of the class became quite engaged in understanding their peers, correcting them, or comparing their results to theirs.

Just one example of where I saw a clear difference in results. In some of my former courses, I sometimes caught students “swimming” (i.e. not operating on solid ground), meaning that they did not understand the most important concepts of the first few lectures – often, I only noticed this in the final exam, which (obviously) was way too late. Now, I saw it hands-on in early tutorials and sometimes could adjust it on the spot: I could at least make a student aware of what they didn’t understand and what they should focus on to make things more "solid’’ for them.