How To Learn Effectively from Video Lectures

eyal my name is David Gilliland I teach at Griffith University in the southeast corner of Queensland Australia I'm creating this video initially for the students that I teach and that my colleagues teach at Griffith and I hope it'll be really useful for you guys but I also think it's probably raises some issues and some questions that people all around the world are dealing with so I'm going to put it on open YouTube and everyone's free to use it and share it if you do use it and you're not a Griffith student if you're from some distant place why not drop me an email at the email address on this slide do you learn at Griffith edu a you because it would just be really cool for me to get a sense of where this little video that I made on a Wednesday afternoon in in the Gold Coast has been useful to other people around the world so I want to talk a little bit about how you learn effectively from video lectures the notion of a flipped classroom is fairly influential in university education these days so it takes the old idea of and I don't think it's it was ever quite like that anyway but the assumption was that in the olden days you would go to university you would sit in the lecture and listen to the lecturer and absorb the content knowledge take notes and that was where you were getting that was where you're learning that was we were getting the content the information and then you'd go home and do homework you would do assignments readings study practice appropriate preparation for exams and so on the flipped classroom says it might be more efficient if you do the the learning the content knowledge acquisition bit of learning at home by watching a video lecture and then spend your time in tutorials on campus or in online tutorials actively engaging with the lecturer or the tutor and the other students in the class and the ideas so you do that work with the ideas the reinforcement the testing the correction the improvement of your ideas with other people and you do the content acquisition part by yourself watching a video so I'm going to talk a little bit about how to most effectively learn from video as a medium of instruction the video might have just the presenter talking like a talking head or it might have just the PowerPoint with the voice behind it or it might have the combination like we've got in this video so there's a number of different kinds of media there might be animations simulations video clips and other things that are used in the video as well but overall some of these tips about how to learn best from video will be useful I hope so before we get into that let's talk a little bit about what it is to learn at university and one of the things is that it's not just about remembering facts it's not just about being told something trying really hard to remember it studying taking notes and then basically regurgitating that on the exam it's much more about perspective transformations it's about changing the way you look at the world changing the way you think about new theoretical approaches that make you think about the world in different ways so that's quite a different notion of what learning is about so when you're engaging with the video it needs to be not just I need to try and remember what's in this video it needs to be how is this challenging my thinking learning is about getting a new theoretical perspective and it might be uncomfortable sometimes it's meant to be it's really challenging if you have had a set of assumptions a set of beliefs a set of stereotypes that you've been using to make sense of the world and those are challenged that's not always comfortable that's often uncomfortable but it's meant to be because it's like going to the gym if you go to the gym and you're not sore the next day you you may as well not have gone to the gym you haven't worked out those muscles and mentally if you engage with the content and it doesn't hurt then you might not be engaging with it deeply enough so challenge yourself to really engage deeply with the content and to challenge your perspective and to hold different ideas in tension so I might look at a classroom situation from a psychologist's view where I'm looking at the individuals and how they work or I might look at it from a sociologist view where I'm looking at the individual their group processes and how well they're different ideas that you hold in tension that are both useful for thinking about a situation so this is something about what University learning is about what it's for what it is like at its best so how do you do that best with video here's a few and then we're really just tips they ought to be obvious I apologize if they sound condescendingly obvious but we know that students don't necessarily do these things or not do these things so minimize distractions look I'm 55 but I'm kind of a millennial in a in a boomers / Generation X body in that I think I can multitask I have lots of devices I tend to have more than one window open on the computer at a time and have musical in the background and possibly video and a bunch of stuff going on it's fine if it's just for entertainment or if you're doing some kind of hack work or something but if you are trying to learn you need to be in one place ideally by yourself not around other people ideally with earphones in and with only the one screen open open to full screen so that you're watching listening engaging actively so minimize all the distractions you can don't have multiple windows open don't have multiple devices don't be messing about on your phone in facebook while you're trying to listen to the lecture and so on similarly I strongly suggest taking notes by hand in handwriting now if you have a tablet device that allows you to take notes by hand in handwriting and then have that converted into typescript for later reference that's fine but there is quite good strong research that shows that when you take notes by hand it stays in your brain when you take notes by typing on a keyboard it tends not to we get so automated and so skilled without typing that it can go basically hand they're sort of eyes two hand two fingers two computer without passing through our brain and getting processed so although it might be tempting although we tend to type much more than handwrite these days taking notes by hand is a really good tip if you want to actually recall understand be able to really work effectively with the knowledge and don't be afraid to pause the video it's one of the affordances of video you can't in the lecture at uni say oh please stop for a minute I need to catch up on my notes or I need to think about this topic or I need to go back don't be afraid to pause or rewind or revisit use the fact that the video can be stopped started you if you go off into a daydream or the phone rings and you miss a bit you can go back and so on so use that use that ability if you they say something and you say what that pause it and think about it write yourself a question it challenge yourself think about it okay so a bunch of stuff around how you use the video and then about how you take notes as well be active do it actively so you're not just summarizing what's on the slide or what the speaker says if you're just summarizing it's kind of a waste of time you can look at the slides don't assume that if you've looked at the slides you understand the content of the lecture so actively ask questions what's coming next why did he or she say that what what how does this relate to this other topic from before so you're not just capturing what's happening in the moment you're making connections across from earlier in the course later in the course your other courses your life experience all of that kind of thing so you're really actively listening and actively trying to make sense of what's going on remember what I said about it being about a perspective transformation it needs to change what and how you're actually thinking and viewing the world so active engagement with your learning don't just copy it down and summarize it don't just use text different people have different personal styles so some people will do it all as pictures and diagrams graphs mind maps a whole variety of visual stuff some people will do it mostly as text with a few little up arrows and down arrows to summarize or all little graphs and things but you know use the fact that you're not just typing on a keyboard with just text use the fact that you're using a pen or a stylus to draw diagrams to draw a little arrows to connect things to each other and so on so again actively learning and listening actively taking those notes and making them rich using visual and other media make it work if there's something that you're stuck on actively go seeking answers so it might be later in the video you might make a note of something and say wait wait what and then 10 minutes later that comes out well if you've made a note of it you'll pay attention when it comes out 10 minutes later if you don't get the answer then go to the tutor and ask or ask your classmates or do something so that you're not leaving things they in your brain that when you find something new confused about you're capturing that by taking a note about it and then asking someone or going to find out or reading up or checking the web or whatever it happens to be that makes it clear for you note things that you'll take to the tutorial the these learning experiences are not disconnected from each other it's a whole course so the video lecture is a piece of the learning experience and the tutorial is a different piece of the same learning experience so there should be cross-pollination the lick the tutorial should give you questions to take to the video the video should give you questions and answers and ideas to date back to the tutorial so just it by way of summary these videos should be short and I hope my colleagues who make these kind of teaching videos are making them short because it's good for attention span and taking a pause and going back and working with things is really important so flipped classroom can be a great place to learn but you need to take responsibility for your own learning it can't be a passive absorbing process because it will just float through the very top of your brain and straight out again without staying getting deep getting reinforced and processed and worked on be prepared to go back to the video three weeks later and bring it all back to the top of your brain because the more times you revisit it more times you'll recall it and be able to work with it there are skills involved and I've tried to outline a few of those it's not just obvious what it takes to learn effectively from a video lecture but if you get the skills practice the skills learn more skills discover what works for you personally as well but don't fool yourself like it's easy to say well for me personally having having the video on one of the window and not using it and having a bunch of other stuff going on is fine you're probably fooling yourself if you go back and actually check what the quality of your notes and the quality of your understanding you'll find that really fullscreen is worthwhile doing but do find out what works for you and then the other thing that I would say by way of summary is these same skills will work in on-campus lectures except pausing you can't pause the lecturer people occasionally try to do it to me but oh aside from that doing this stuff the active writing the the taking notes that are not just a summary the taking notes at all is really important the handwritten notes there's a bunch of stuff here that's useful for on-campus lectures or other experiences as well seminars and so on so I really hope that's useful to you it's a bunch of stuff that I've learned it is backed up by research and theory but I haven't kind of Louden it later laden it down with references and so on but these are ways that have been shown to actually help students learn effectively and get good grades pass but more importantly than that be educated to be citizens and people who know about the world who have really interesting educated complicated views of what the world is like so thanks very much for listening and enjoy and learn a lot

Channel: David Geelan

Views: 6,044

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Id: 6XhoQD2uucs

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 05 2019