Choosing Face-to-face or Video-based Instruction in a Mobile App Development Course

Abstract

The face-to-face interaction in a traditional classroom on campus provides many benefits to students: the ability to ask questions and get immediate feedback, external motivation from the instructor and peers to succeed, the joy of interaction, and the ability to work face-to-face with classmates on projects. Meanwhile, video-based, online instruction offers several different benefits: convenience for students due to flexibility in time and place of learning, ease of reviewing materials for mastery, and the ability to work at one's own pace. When given the choice between these two formats, which do students choose? Students enrolled in an upper-level mobile app development course could opt to attend class with face-to-face instruction, to watch videos of the instructor, or to switch between the two formats as they saw fit. Students were given pre- and post-surveys asking them which format they preferred and why. Results indicate that slightly more than half of the students chose the video-based option and that students chose as they did for expected reasons, such as wanting to ask questions in class or wanting the flexibility to watch and re-watch video on demand. More interestingly, results also indicated that students who chose video did not suffer from the dropout and failure rates so commonly reported in the literature, that learning was equally effective using both formats, and that students' expectations of which format they would use were quite different from what they ended up using. However, with a small sample size at one institution, local factors, like scheduling the course during lunchtime, also played a role in students' choices.