The presenters will discuss the creation of a video tutorial library by the Mechanical Engineering Department at Cal Poly Pomona for relatively low cost. The library is available to the public as an open educational resource and has benefitted students, the department, the university, and people around the world.
The open courseware movement has grown significantly since the early 2000s. Today many prestigious institutions with large endowments, such as MIT and Harvard, have developed extensive databases of videos and other free education resources, including complete self-paced online courses. Unfortunately the potentially high cost to develop and maintain such content has made it difficult for primarily undergraduate institutions, such as state universities and community colleges, to participate in the open courseware movement. However, in the past decade advances in recording technology and hosting solutions have dramatically reduced the cost of developing educational content and sharing it with the world. With modern recording and editing software, a decent microphone, and a free YouTube account, an individual can produce and share content inexpensively and easily. Many individual instructors routinely create videos for their students and host them on their personal YouTube channel or website, but there are not many examples of entire departments collaborating on creating content for their entire curriculum.
This presentation will describe the development and utilization of a library of video tutorials by the Mechanical Engineering Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona), which is a primarily undergraduate institution. The library was started in March 2013 and currently contains over 500 original videos covering topics in statics, dynamics, strength of materials, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, heat transfer, stress analysis, control systems, computer programming, and numerical modeling. Twelve faculty members and full-time lecturers have contributed to this library by either developing original content themselves or allowing their full-length lectures to be recorded. In addition to full-length lectures, the library contains many short videos covering single topics and example problems.
The funding to develop content for the video library arrived piecemeal during 2012-2017 as various faculty members received over 10 small internal and external grants for the purpose of redesigning their courses with technology. The grants ranged from $1000 to $35000, and the authors estimate that $100,000 – $150,000 was utilized for developing video content, mostly in the form of release time for faculty members to create videos and student assistants to record and edit videos. Recognizing that the department would not have the resources to develop the library all at once, we created a framework that would allow us to incorporate new video resources as they are developed. While the department did not place restrictions on the type of video tutorials that would accepted into the library, guidelines were established to ensure a base level of quality for each video – e.g., all videos must be captioned, the video quality should be 720p or higher, audio quality should be clear, etc. These guidelines were developed with the university’s eLearning staff, which is a team dedicated to helping faculty use technologies in pedagogically effective ways to support student learning.
The videos are hosted on the department’s YouTube channel (CPPMechEngTutorials) to allow for wide distribution at zero cost to the department. Links to the videos are organized on a locally hosted website named ME Online (www.cpp.edu/meonline) to allow students to search for content more easily. All videos are closed captioned and available to the public, allowing anyone in the world to access this open education resource. At the time of writing the YouTube channel has over 2.7 million views and 22,000 subscribers.
A breakdown of costs to the department and university will be presented at the conference. Production and maintenance costs for the department have been kept relatively low through the following means:
- Videos are hosted on YouTube
- Student assistants were often employed by the department to record and edit videos
- Many full-length lectures were recorded and edited by the university’s MediaVision team, which is a unit responsible for recording on-campus events
- The initial version of ME Online website was created by the university’s IT Web Development team and eLearning team, and the website is hosted on a local server
- Mechanical Engineering faculty members volunteer their time to maintain the library and ME Online website
In order to gauge the impact of the video library on current Cal Poly Pomona mechanical engineering students, in March 2018 a survey was administered to 340 mechanical engineering students in Sophomore, Junior, and Senior-level courses, which represents over one-quarter of the entire department. Data was gathered on topics such as awareness of the video resources, frequency of viewing by students, frequency of use by instructors, and feedback about the video library. Overall the survey results indicate that students believe that the videos are useful and want the department to continue expanding the video library. Indeed, when asked how ME Online could improve, many students requested more content. Below is a summary of the results:
- 67% of students were aware of ME Online
- Among students who knew about the video library…
- 87% felt the videos had a “small positive” or “large positive” impact on their education
- 74% accessed the videos at least a few times per quarter
- 75% felt the video library helped improve their grades in at least one class
- 45% felt full-length lectures were the most beneficial type of video
- 43% reported that their instructors either required or recommended videos from the library during the quarter
The analytics data available in YouTube offers some insight into how the video library is being utilized around the world. At the time of writing, the total amount of viewing time for the entire library is over 11 million minutes. The United States accounts for 37% of the total viewing time, with India (6.7%), Canada (6.1%), U.K. (4.6%), Turkey (3.1%), Malaysia (2.3%), and Australia (2.0%) all having at least 200,000 minutes of viewing time. The most highly watched videos are full-length lectures, although many of the shorter videos are very popular as well.
The videos from the library have been utilized by the department to experiment with new pedagogical strategies. Faculty have conducted studies on the impact of introducing video tutorials in a vector dynamics course, flipping a fluid mechanics course, and flipping a computer programming course. In the fluid mechanics course, the flipped classroom strategy resulted in failure rates being reduced by over 50% and a large increase in the number of A’s. The flipped classroom approach also resulted in improved grades in the computer programming course. Additional benefits to the department include the use of videos to ensure a consistent curriculum among part-time lecturers and the repurposing of videos to develop Cal Poly Pomona’s first massive open online course (MOOC) in 2014. Future work includes utilizing the videos to experiment with a supplemental instruction pedagogical model and creating a podcast series on topics relevant to current and potential engineering students.
The ME Online video library is a good example of how collaborations among individual faculty members and university entities can produce a resource that is utilized and appreciated by students. The session will be designed to help attendees gain ideas of how they can develop a video library for their own department. Not only will the presenters give a detailed account of their journey, but also will engage the attendees in a brainstorming activity where they will think of ways to develop a video library at their own institution. We believe the presentation can be a blueprint for anyone at any university to develop their own video library regardless of resource limitations.