Short video contest without textual content as a tool to synthesize learnings (an international experience)

Resumen

New technologies have revolutionized teaching methodology on all formative levels. The fact that almost all students have a smartphone with an Internet connection, and the fact that all the studentsare digitally native, allows this resource to be incorporated as an educational element without having to give extra technological advice to the students. In this experience we decided to test the possibletraining effect of an activity of video recording and edition as an element of synthesis of learning. This exercise, if well raised, should require an effort from the students to review the contents of thesubject matter and, what is more important, to do an exercise of summarizing the contents and to present the information in a proper way to be concise, clear and self-explanatory. To reach this objective,we proposed an international video contest to students from two universities and two vocational training centers. The students belonged to two cities (Alicante and Jihlava) found in two differentcountries (Spain and the Czech Republic). The centres involved were (1) the University of Alicante, (2) the IES Leonardo da Vinci (3) Soukromá Vyšší Odborná Škola Sociální, O.p.s. and (4) Vysokáškola polytechnická Jihlava. According to the mandatory rules exposed in the rules of the contest, the videos should (1) have didactic purposes in a matter related to their training, (2) be recorded with the phone in landscape format, (3) have a maximum duration of two minutes, (4) have no spoken text, so that videos can be understood by people from both countries, (5) have the essential texts in English, so they can be understood by people from both countries and (6) include background music not protected by copyright (they should have a Creative Commons license). In total, 36 contest entrieswere submitted on time. Following the video’s submission, the authors were sent a self-administered questionnaire online to freely comment the experience. The questionnaire was answered by 71 people(84.3% of them were women, 67.6% under 21 and 93% under 30 years). A total of 78.9% of the respondents said it was easy or “moderately easy” to make the video, 59.2% declared that they did not make much effort to review any content of the subject matter, and 63.4% said that they managed to show all the content planned despite the time constraint. The students consider that the experience was positive for them, since 87.3% of the students said that their video was formative, 78.9% affirmed that the experience was rewarding, and 85.9% considered that the effort of making the video was worth it. Infact 90.2% said we should repeat the experience in the following courses. In view of the results and the good perceived attitude in the classroom, we conclude that the realization of these short videos andthe format of “international contest” is well received by students as an interesting experience, which makes them reflect on the contents of their own degrees and is moreover considered positive for them.