Exploring the effectiveness of student-generated video tutorials in electronic lab-based teaching

Lab-based teaching in which hands-on experiments are to be conducted by students takes an important part for a wide range of engineering and science disciplines. In our current practice, the lab-based teaching involves live demonstration and tutorials after the off-line lab manual review. This has become particularly problematic when the number of students is large and insufficiency on the lab-supporting system becomes a common issue. In the meantime, even with a small number of students, it can be interesting to prepare the lab in a one-to-one tutorial. Well-designed video tutorials eliminate the time and space constraints on learning and provide comprehensive details to students to enable them focus on deepening the understanding of concepts, rather than spending majority of time on trouble shooting during the lab. With the full technical support from the Digital Learning Resources Hub at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, we propose to involve student volunteers to generate a series of customized video tutorials for our electronics lab-based teaching practice. From the viewpoint of students themselves, these video tutorials are carefully designed based on students' learning needs to seamlessly integrate a wide range of theoretical and practical information. Under the supervision of staff, volunteers will be able to repeat their learning cycles with a different role and enhance their own understanding and knowledge structures, promoting the student-centered education model. Some scenery-based video tutorials will be used in the online quizzes questions to better prepare the students. The generated video tutorials will be shared across a number of electronic engineering modules to further investigate the effectiveness of these video tutorials. The effectiveness can be further explored using online questionnaires and online quizzes and evaluated by comparative studies.