Effects of video tutorials on first year engineering student’s engagement and learning performance

New technologies offer tremendous power to assist with design and change in higher education curricula. Online educational resources have become increasingly common in recent years, as evidenced by their use in distance education and blended learning courses. In particular, one of the latest trends to appear online is the mass creation of online expository videos, including how-to, tutorial, and lecture videos (Carter, Cooper, Adcock, & Branham, 2014). As a result, a large number of free educational videos have become available on the internet. Several previous studies (Ajumobi, Malakouti, Bullen, Ahaneku, & Lunsford, 2015; Majid, Khine, Oo, & Lwin, 2012; Rittberg, Dissanayake, & Katz, 2015) together with our own observations have shown that without necessary skills to search, locate, process, evaluate and use information, students often experience various information related problems, such as information overload, inability to find the needed information and to extract the important points. Also it has been demonstrated that only a minority of YouTube videos are useful for teaching due to misleading content and poor quality (Fischer, Geurts, Valderrabano, & Hügle, 2013; Raikos & Waidyasekara, 2014; Yaylaci et al., 2014). But the demand for multi-mode learning continues to rise among today’s students where the development and integration of video lessons to the course curricula could be the option. With new technologies it has now become possible for educators to self-create high quality video materials (Bae & Lee, 2015) which can be further integrated to the course and serve as a self-study, revision tool or an alternative option for students studying by distance. The aim of this study was to increase UWSCollege student’s engagement and learning performance in Electrical Fundamentals which has been identified as one of the most difficult units for students during their first year of study. This would be done by creating educational video content which would be shared with a variety of stakeholders via a YouTube channel