(Julia Evans & Billy Rowell)
We decided on a task-driven approach to compare the efficacy of these approaches. Essentially, the students would be given a task or set of tasks related to the material being covered, and they would be allowed access to the videos or instructors until they were able to complete the tasks. Then we would compare the total amount of time (instructor’s time + student’s time) required to complete the task. This, in addition to qualitative questions (“How did you like this style of teaching?”, “How well do you feel you understand this subject?”), could help us gain some insight on the efficacy of these approaches.
In order to compare the approaches, you’d need an instructor with background in all approaches, covering the same content in each case, and instructing students with the same background. The most difficult part of measuring using this approach is controlling for the instructor’s preparation time, but Julia had a great idea for how to handle this.
An idea of how to control for preparation time
Choose a task to be completed, and split the students into 2 groups of 30 students
Explain the task to each student in the 1st group individually. Record the time it took for each student to be able to do the task
Add up all those times to get the total amount of time you spent explaining the task to each student (say, X hours)
Spend X hours putting together a video explaining the task
Give the video to all the students in the 2nd group, and measure how long it takes them to complete the task (let them move around/fast forward the video as they wish)
(it’s also possible that people won’t be able to learn the task at all)
This also gives the video the advantage of expertise: you’ve already explained the task 30 times to individual students, and should have a good idea of how to best explain it to help the other students understand.
We expect that students with access only to videos will have the advantage of being able to replay the videos as many times as necessary to learn the subject and complete the task. The advantage to the instructor in this situation is that the videos can be reused. The advantages of the in-person or online tutoring are that you can tailor the instruction and examples to the students in the class, and since they have direct access to the instructor, you can focus on the aspects of the subject or task with which the students are having the most difficulty.