MedEdPublish (Apr 2018)
YouTube Videos as a Tool for Faculty Development in Medical Education: A Learning Analytic Overview
Abstract
Faculty development (FD), or staff development, as it is often called, has become an increasingly important component of medical education. Staff development activities have been designed to improve teacher effectiveness at all levels of the educational continuum. The use of online tools offers many advantages for FD, and online learning can help overcome the numerous obstacles that challenge classic educational activities. Video-based lectures (VBLs) are one of the tools of online learning. This particular instruction format has gained popularity in recent years as a component of the "flipped classroom" (FC) and the much more emergent "massive open online course" (MOOC) styles of health profession education at both under- and post-graduate levels. The aim of this study was to describe the author's experience in developing VBLs to be used as a tool for faculty development in the field of medical education by using Learning Analytics (LA), which is the metadata provided by YouTube, the sharing platform used for the author's videos. A total of 19 VBLs relevant to the education of healthcare professionals was produced by the author with the software program ScreenFlow for Mac to capture and edit video. ScreenFlow also offers the option to combine screen video capture with speaker video recording for simultaneous viewing in the same video. The collected and analyzed data consisted of viewership data, including total number of views, numbers of countries viewing, gender distribution of viewers, and number of YouTube channel subscribers. Descriptive data were also collected: length of each video, watch time in minutes and number of views. Data related to viewers' engagement included number of videos' likes, dislikes, shares, and comments. For the purpose of evaluating audience retention and measuring how well videos maintained viewer attention, the following information was included in the audience retention report: average view duration for all videos on the channel, the average percentage viewed of each video, and the final audience retention. In conclusion, VBLs can be considered a valuable tool for faculty development in medical education that effectively overcomes many of the common challenges related to this important training process. A variety of software programs and applications are available that facilitate the process of VBL production, particularly the accessibility of many video-sharing platforms, such as YouTube. Moreover, LA is an emerging and effective method for quantitatively evaluating VBLs. LA includes analyzing metadata, which are downloaded from video-sharing platforms and facilitates the evaluation of the acceptability, accessibility, and audience retention of VBLs. That is, the number of views reflects the acceptability of VBLs, and the number of likes/dislikes and shares reflects audience engagement. Likewise, av-er-age view dur-a-tion, av-er-age per-cent-age viewed, and final audience retention are indicators of audience retention (AR). Finally, it appears that the length of VBLs has a profound effect on AR, as shorter VBLs are associated with greater AR, and vice versa. The synchronous interaction with speaker should be considered in VBLs to enhance their effectiveness and improve the AR.
