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An Academic Online Resource at Técnico Lisboa
Ana Moura Santos and Rui Costa
which professors, while answering students’ questions
during office hours, detect which are the contents that are
more difficult for students to understand, and then propose
to the student technical team that they record in the
following week an explanatory video on the subject. With
this quick feedback from the students, the project is quick
to adapt to students’ needs. This is something that is hard
to accomplish in general MOOCs, which are designed to
serve the vast majority of students worldwide. Apart from
this, the organization of the contents follows the general
structure of a technical book, which is divided into several
chapters that contain several separate topics, called in
this project video modules. In this context, the expertise
of the professors is used in order to guarantee that the
contents are divided in the most accurate and correct
manner, while students once more can give their input to
highlight the topics in which they experienced the most
difficulties. The feedback from students who have already
passed a course whose videos are being developed is another
determining factor in deciding where to focus efforts:
it is better to reinforce topics that the majority of
students have more problems dealing with.
Another positive fact of having videos constructed in the
form of granular modules is that, in the case of course curriculum
changes, it is easier to replace or add a new video
module to the project web platform. In addition, the project
technical team, together with professors, found that
there are some video modules that can be easily integrated
within the curricula of different courses. For instance,
matrix transformations, that are one of the basic concepts
in Linear Algebra, are very useful in a Computer Graphics
course, and in some other contexts. The separate video
modules can, and should, be inserted in the topics of more
than one course, therefore reducing the development
cost of the project. This last feature also helps students to
establish relations between basic concepts taught in the
first years of their undergraduate studies and applications
in several specific areas of their engineering degree.
Therefore, having the contents developed within the
institution, with faculty members from different departments
involved, and delivered in the native language, the
Academic project can solve the problems related with
understanding and establishing connections between the
technical jargon of the online contents and the ones actually
taught in classes, while having videos directly correlated
with learning needs.
Since the project is at its very beginning, it is still hard
to analyze all the benefits from the learning point of view.
There are many clear advantages sensed by students such
as any time/any place explanations and the possibility for
a student to return to something only half understood in
a class. To what extent a teacher at Técnico Lisboa can use
these materials in a course also depends on his/her “beliefs”
in this kind of content. To our knowledge, there are
some faculty members already planning to use the video
modules in a flipped classroom model in future semesters.
First Statistics
In order to assess the usefulness of this project, as well as
to understand students’ needs regarding the proliferation
of online-based educational (eLearning) content, different
surveys and usage data analysis were performed. In this
section we analyze first a survey carried out with the entire
student community of Técnico Lisboa and then usage
statistics of both the IEEE-IST Academic web portal and
YouTube channel.
During the first two weeks of March 2013, an online
survey for undergraduates and master-degree students
at Técnico Lisboa (circa ten thousand students) asked
questions about their practices in the context of online academic
resources. From the three thousand students who
fully answered the questions of the survey, 59.54% said
that they use online resources as a complement to standard
classes, 82.58% of the students use online resources
for clarifying not well-understood concepts and 69.68%
answered that they use the contents in order to prepare
for assessment, tests and exams.
Taking into account the period between September
2012 and February 2013, equivalent to one full semester
of classes in Portugal, an analysis of the IEEE-IST Academic
website traffic has been performed, based on several
metrics. The website had a total of 16,959 visits from
5,871 unique visitors, with a total of 58,041 page views,
meaning a rate of 3.42 page views per visit. The average
visit duration was of 5 minutes and 48 seconds. During
this period, from all the visits registered, 65.53% were returning
visitors, while 34.47% were new visitors.
The above-mentioned results show that a good percentage
of users felt the need to come back and use the
IEEE-IST Academic portal again, spending a reasonable
time browsing the site. It is important to note that You-
Tube video viewers are higher than the viewers of the
website, due to the direct browsing of the IEEE-IST Academic
videos through the YouTube website and search
engine.
From the total number of visitors, 93.39% were from
Portugal, while 4.9% (830 visits) were from Brazil. This
number shows that, by creating video modules in Portuguese,
other countries with the same native language
can share the same produced materials. It is important to
note that no advertising was done in Brazil regarding this
initiative, meaning that all visitors ended up browsing the
website as a result of search engine results.
Regarding traffic sources, 34.81% were a result of
search engine queries, 28.59% from references from
other websites and social media and 36.60% came from
direct traffic.
Experience Track | 266