2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The creation and use of digital content to deliver lectures and supplement instruction has been on an upswing for a number of years. This trend showed a tremendous growth over the pandemic as expected with the transition to some variation of online delivery whether it was remote teaching or via the development of high quality online courses. A dominant mechanism for lecture delivery in engineering disciplines at a large university in the southwest has been the use of video. A short survey of faculty identified 3 dominant strains in video production (1) Video content captured using Zoom (2) Video content captured in professional studio settings and (3) Video content captured in classrooms using existing lecture capture technologies built in class.
The second strain of video creation has consisted of faculty either using a standard camera setup in a studio or using a lighboard. The lightboard is a large glass pane illuminated by LED strips around the edges. The instructor stands behind the pane and writes on the board with various colored grease pencils. A mirror-effect is added for the reversal of the image for the camera. The result is an instructor facing the audience with drawings and schematics which are easily discernable by the viewing audience (Birdwell & Peshkin, 2015; Ganbat & Naidandorj, 2018).
The key advantage of this technique is that it essentially lets the faculty member lecture like they normally would using a whiteboard, except the lightboard is a transparent board which lets the students see the faculty expressions and interactions. This qualitative study was designed to compare student engagement between the two video types that were used for instruction. Further we also surveyed faculty on their preferred methodology of lecture capture, along with the advantages and disadvantages of the two.
The data shows that the students overall felt that the lightboard videos showed a slight advantage in providing engagement over the traditional video. It was interesting to note thought that even though the students strongly preferred the lightboard videos for engagement, stimulation and satisfaction, a large number of them indicated easier learning from the standard video. Analysis of the open ended responses show that the students may potentially view the lightboard videos as a bit distracting compared to what was termed “old school” videos or standard videos in our parlance.