Students’ ways of using video lectures in a linear algebra course

Video lectures have become a common element in many university mathematics courses, and students often believe that these support their learning in various ways. However, some studies indicate that students who use such video lectures frequently perform lower in exams. Hence, it is important to investigate how students use video lectures. We interviewed nine students of a linear algebra course about the activities they carried out when watching prerecorded video lectures. In these interviews, all our participants reported in detail lots of activities they engaged in while watching, and our study contextualizes these activities with content-specific examples. However, our study also indicates that even if students are very active while watching video lectures, their cognitive engagement with the actual content might nevertheless be rather low. Possible consequences concerning the implementation of video lectures are then discussed.