Screencasts
Screencasts are short screen captures, usually of a tablet PC, with instructor narration. They supplement textbooks and lectures by featuring solutions to example problems, explanations of concepts, software tutorials, descriptions of diagrams, and material reviews. They are made and reviewed by faculty. (CC) indicates the entire topic has corrected closed captioning. Interactive screencasts present a multiple choice question where the viewer chooses an answer within the video. The video response guides the user to the correct answer and explanation. There are over 1,500 screencasts available for the following engineering courses/topics:
Study Help
The following screencasts were developed using psychology literature on how to study.
Benefits of Using Screencasts
Publications on the use of screencasts in courses at the University of Colorado Boulder:
Student feedback in courses using screencasts has been positive, with the majority of students finding them useful or very useful. In one student-survey (Fluid Mechanics course), over half of the students claimed to have watched over half of the Fluid Mechanics screencasts.
With screencasts, instructors can reach a larger percentage of their student pool than office hours alone, and supplement coursework with advanced content/review material that may not be efficiently covered in the limited time available in class.
Screencasts allow instructors to cater to students' different learning styles by providing them alternative resources to textbooks and lectures, as well as valuable review materials. Furthermore, the ability to stop, rewind, and re-watch the videos allows students to learn at their own pace.
The following resources can help instructors develop these relatively easy-to-create, high-impact educational tools. We usually use tablet PCs with OneNote for writing out problems and Camtasia (which records the computer screen) for audio-video editing.
General:
Camtasia/OneNote:
How to Link To/Embed Our Screencasts:
|
|
|
    |
 |
These
resources were developed with support by the National Science Foundation (Grants DUE 0920640, DUE 1322300, and DUE 1244183). Any opinions,
findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.