Activating Casts in Technical educatION at Eindhoven University of Technology

Project introduction and background information

ACTION is a TU/e educational project that provides a technical and didactic framework to help teachers producing and using activating media casts (video and audio) in class.

Moreover, it provides examples of several media casts that have been developed within this framework and that have been tested in class.

Within the project ACTION information has been collected on both the technical and pedagogical aspects of using these media in class and their interplay. With the help of this information, teachers can enrich their teaching with activating and appealing videos and audio cast.    

The project aimed on understanding how to use ICT in general and audio and video casts in particular. Teachers should not only be knowledgeable of the contents, didactics and technology involved, but also of the interplay between them (TPACK).

Within the project ACTION information has been collected on both the technical and pedagogical aspects of using these media in class and their interplay.

With the help of this information, teachers can enrich their teaching with activating and appealing videos and audio cast.

Knowledge clips are short lectures on a specific topic. Knowledge clips are recordings in a studio setting, screen casts or presentations with voice-over or even video-over. Within ACTION, the majority of the produced casts fall into this category. Although knowledge clips can be used for the same purposes as recordings of lectures, they can and are often also used for flipping the classroom. Some advantages of Knowledge clips over recordings of lectures are:

•  There are various relatively easy ways of producing them, e.g. as pen/screen casts, or as voice over Powerpoint
•  Their length matches the attention time span of students
•  Material can be used over many years
• Easy to reuse
• If produced in the right way, easy to update.

Both recordings of lectures and knowledge clips add images and Interactivity to the learning activities. Their primary focus is to help students to memorize and understand the material

When recordings of lectures and knowledge clips areintegratedwith other e-content, such as quizzes, discussion fora, etc., they not only help students in the process of memorizing and understand the material, but also to apply and analyze it.

Results and learnings

More information about the strong points and experiences of the users can be found here: http://www.win.tue.nl/action/index.html#

Practical outcomes

The project has tips and tricks both on the aspect of didactics as on the Technical aspects, you can find them om the project website: http://www.win.tue.nl/action/index.html#