Learning Physics with Interactive Videos - Possibilities, Perception, and Challenges

Abstract

Videos on YouTube are very popular among students and therefor the number of educational videos is growing. In general, such videos are a learning opportunity with unique features like visual highlighting or multiple representations and can be watched as often as you like. Moreover, videos can be used in many different ways: to repeat things, to learn something new, or for entertainment. Here the paper presents a study among n=260 German students to determine how often and why students are watching educational videos in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Furthermore, the study shows unfortunately that students often just watch learning videos passively; whereas, learning needs an active processing. So making already available online videos more interactive with tasks, questions, and quizzes can foster an active processing and students should perceive interactive videos as more helpful when learning online. To do so the paper presents the free and open source tool H5P, which can be easily used by every teacher to enrich learning videos with tasks, feedback, summaries, or additional information.