Multimedia as a substitute or complement to an optional lecture

Abstract

This work aims to analyze a pedagogical practice promoting learning and student involvement using digital media in an engineering science course. The objective of this practice is to maintain a fully face-to-face teaching with lectures and tutorials, but to offer in parallel multimedia resources accessible online, for students who do not wish to participate in the lecture course and to make students work and revise outside the course sessions. Multimedia resources provision as in reverse pedagogy, and its impact on student learning styles, are explored in this article. The main results show that attendance in face-to-face teaching decreases with video provision, even if some students remain very attached to the lectures. The drop in the concomitance of students’ work with the progress of the course, identified as a risk, demonstrates the need of increasing students’ supervision with this type of pedagogy. The students’ approval for this co-modal teaching method is highlighted in this work. For the teacher, the simple software used to create multimedia resources allow to work with complete autonomy, but the time required for these developments mustn’t be neglected. This co-modal teaching mode is a gain of freedom as much for the teacher as for the students.