Author: Steve Spencer, s.spencer@shu.ac.uk

Author: Richard Pountney, r.p.pountney@shu.ac.uk

JISC e-Learning Activity Area: Learning Resources and Activities

Higher Education Academy Subject Centre: Sociology, Anthropology and Politics

This case study illustrates...use of video, an effect on learning, an effect on student personal development, student satisfaction with e-learning, innovation in learning and teaching, an influence on educational research, staff satisfaction with e-learning, staff personal development, a positive effect on recruitment, a positive effect on retention, an effect on social equality

Lessons Learned

Summary and Reflection

Overall the use of digital video is beneficial as long as the design of the resource and integration into teaching is carefully considered.

This visual approach is complex, and can be time consuming but the benefits to social scientists are many. As Simmons suggested in a recent article:

'...interactivity and visuals in online materials increase opportunities for learning but also simultaneously introduce complexities.'

Personally I have learned the need to consider the use of video carefully in both research and teaching to ensure an ethical and appropriate use of the resource to demonstrate quality of research and demonstrate the theoretical issues in research methods - particularly the importance of using several methods to strengthen the validity of the interpretation of social reality.

In this case the students valued the graphic examples which posed very different cases from those they might have been pursuing, but perhaps as a result threw the approaches to research and the difficulties of validation, accessibility and ethical dimensions into sharper relief. Pedagogically the opportunity to critically view the subjects of research and how they reacted to being interviewed was invaluable and exposed their reactions to questions, the power and immediacy of their narratives, and at times the problems of misinterpreting the social context, asking inappropriate or poorly formed questions.

Further - the value of hypermedia approaches in teaching is beginning to be recognised and adopted by lecturers. Innovations like making short videos to illustrate research methods and specific case studies are more attractive with the advent of new and more user-friendly technology minimising the need for expert assistance. Thematic collections of online visual resources offer the most immediate resource for lecturers and students as long as copyright issues are clarified.