Student video curation

In the academic year 2020-21 Middlesex University maths students accessed all learning sessions remotely. Each of these interactive sessions was live-streamed, recorded and uploaded to our Virtual Learning Environment, providing hundreds of hours of recorded, unedited maths lecture for students to review.
In this project (partially funded by an IMA Education Grant) we invited undergraduates to reflect on their remote learning experiences and curate these video lectures. Students were asked to identify the most engaging, most useful and most interesting segments, and explain their choices to help us develop our approach to producing engaging videos.
A total of 33 video clips were identified by students across levels 4 to 6 on our specialist BSc Mathematics and BSc Mathematics with Computing programmes. Students categorised their choices, explicitly flagging some segments as “very engaging”, and provided free-text comments to explain their choices. In this presentation we will discuss our findings, illustrate with examples clips, identify themes in the student choices, and conclude with tips to produce engaging video content.
We will also discuss applications of video curation as a social pedagogic tool for the current generation of university “Zoomer” students (otherwise known as “Generation Z”). Ipsos Mori report these students have ubiquitous access to digital communication technology, but lower income families are less likely to use this technology for learning and are less likely to develop certain key skills as a result [Ipsos Thinks, 2018]. We will argue that sharing how students’ interact with digital learning resources can help address this significant digital divide in education.