Enseñanza & Teaching (Jan 2013)
Assimilation of contents and learning through the use of video tutorials
Abstract
The need for a change in the university educational model promoted by the establishment of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has promoted the implementation of numerous proposals for innovation in university teaching. These innovative practices that are based on a process of reflection and analysis of past teaching experience, are helping to improve qualitatively the teaching practice and, consequently, the learning process and outcomes of students, from a process of reflection and analysis of the teaching experience. In this context, this paper focuses on analyzing a specific teaching tool for innovation, the video tutorial, in order to assess its influence on the processes of assimilation of contents and self-learning. In particular, we attempt to show if the video tutorial allows reinforcing the understanding of practical contents that have been previously given by the classical method of masterly exposition. From the analysis of data obtained through a survey directed to a sample of students after experimenting with the teaching tool, it is shown that the video tutorial is considered a very suitable tool to improve the assimilation capacity of the contents taught previously and to acquire higher learning. After performing a regression analysis, the research also shows that students’ attitudes toward multimedia tools and the perceived utility of video tutorial positively influence these capacities. On the contrary, we find that the attitude towards individual learning and the attention paid by the student to the contents of the video tutorial do not affect the level of learning obtained from this tool.
