Cathy Collett from the Multidisciplinary Engineering Education department at the University of Sheffield gives an overview of a novel style of lab video.
What is a Tasty-style Lab Video?
For the last couple of years, I have been experimenting with making lab videos in the style of recipe videos. The kind that auto-plays on your social media feed as you scroll down. You can watch an example for Apple Pie here.
This video style has been referred to elsewhere as the “Tasty” style, and there are a few aspects that appeal to me:
you could get an overview of how to make a recipe in just one or two minutes
you can watch without requiring audio (e.g. on the train without having to get your headphones out, or turn your music off)
the high-speed presentation is informative and engaging
the overhead first-person perspective better represents what you would actually see if following the recipe
I wondered if this could be an effective way of demonstrating experimental techniques to engineering students. There is plenty of research on the pros and cons of shorter videos, and the benefits of first-person perspective videos (“point-of-view”). I hadn't considered omitting the narration before. From Mayers’ multimedia learning theory, I’d assumed narration would be beneficial, as the brain can process both visual and auditory stimuli in parallel. However, a meta-analysis by Adesope and Nesbit found that there was little benefit to spoken-written presentations compared to written-only presentations - a concept they termed "verbal redundancy". I haven’t seen any research on the use of this video style to support laboratory teaching in Higher Education, so I decided to give it a go!
Why make a Tasty-style Lab Video?
So far I’ve piloted this video style with three different cohorts of engineering students:
Foundation Year Chemistry module (CPE007). After all, experimental procedures in chemistry can often feel like following a ‘recipe’ - add a few ml of this, a few grams of that, heat it up and see what happens. (Although we strongly advise against eating the product afterwards.) You can watch an example for Ion Exchange here.
Masters level Applied Energy Engineering (CPE6311). The Clean Energy experiment involves testing four different pieces of equipment: a solar panel, a wind turbine, a hydrogen electrolyser and a hydrogen fuel cell. The students on this course are primarily international students with English as an additional language, so I was interested to see if they found the videos useful. You can watch an example video for Electrolysis here.
First year Danger Lab. This is an induction lab taken by all first year Engineering students at Sheffield. Students compare the energy needed to break a piece of chocolate at room temperature and liquid nitrogen temperature. We asked students for feedback via an anonymous survey. You can watch the 1-minute Danger Lab video here. A screenshot is shown below.
Being an engineer, naturally I wanted to assess the effectiveness of the videos using numbers! For CPE007, after changing to a Tasty-style video, we found the percentage of the class viewing the video increased from 32% to 52%. For CPE6311 videos we found the percentage of the class viewing remained high, although it did drop slightly from 78% to 73%. In both cases, the percentage of students watching the videos to the end increased, indicating that students found the videos engaging.
For Danger Lab, we found that more students watched the 1-minute video compared to a traditional 5-minute video (574 vs 510 unique viewers), and more watched it to the end (91% vs 65% completion), again indicating that students found the video engaging. The feedback from first year engineers was very positive. Comments included “I liked it a lot, very convenient”, “I liked the short time format because it made the video easily digestible” and “I liked the videos that accompanied each instruction.” No students commented that the video was too fast or difficult to follow, and no student requested narration to improve the video. The main area for improvement was requests for more detail (e.g. zooming in on the liquid nitrogen tank or showing how to set the initial impact energy).
How to make a Tasty-style Lab Video?
I started off using a digital camcorder and tripod to film these experiments, however the tripod was difficult to work around. I now use an overhead mobile phone clamp, available from the Creative Media Team, and an LED light stick to improve the lighting of the videos.
Whilst recording, I realised an additional advantage of this style of video: it didn’t matter what else was going on in the lab at the time! As I wasn’t using the audio, it didn’t matter what conversations, crashes or explosions were going on in the background. As long as I had a corner where I could get on with an experiment, I could keep the camera focused on the experiment and it wouldn’t be filming anyone else in the lab. This meant it was logistically much easier to get the videos filmed.
The main barrier I anticipate staff will have to trying this video style is the time taken to learn how to do the editing. I used Adobe Premiere Pro for the first time in this project, learning from videos from Sheffield's Creative Media team. It did take me a full working day (and a lot of banging my head against the desk) to get it installed and work out how to do the basic functions like zooming, speeding up and adding captions. However, now that I've got the hang of it, I find the editing reasonably straight forward. As it is all one camera angle with no narration, it takes me about 1-2 hours to produce a 1-minute video.
What next?
If you’d like to trial this video style in your own labs, whether at Sheffield or elsewhere, please do get in touch with me (Cathy Collett, c.h.collett@sheffield.ac.uk) - I’d love to know how it goes! You can also check out our Google Site where we’ll be adding resources, guidance and case studies.