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Watching the video helps keeping
concentration
higher”. The reasons mentioned were the unfa-
miliarity of the technological equipment, the poor
audio quality and a merely sufficient visual qual-
ity of the slides in the whiteboard. Additionally
students in remote situations reported difficulties
concentrating for a full, uninterrupted 90-minute
lecture and did not feel themselves perceived by
the lecturer. Obviously in these years most tech-
nical issues have been fixed, the bandwidth has
increased, and probably today's student are more
used to videos over the net. Also, the experiment to
which Hilt refers to is synchronous - and later we
shall discus the difference between asynchronous
video-lecture and lecture over videoconference.
Not all the problems have however disap-
peared. On the negative side, in a distance-learning
context that was heavily based on video-lectures,
students reported insufficient interaction with the
instructor and insufficient interaction with fel-
low students. Also, the students quite frequently
reported the required self-discipline as the least
liked aspect of distance education (Reisslein et al.
2005). This basically means that video-lectures are
an essential ingredient, but they do not suffice. This
point of view is reinforced by the quite innovative
work presented by Brown and Liedholm (2004).
They start from the consideration that students
exhibit different cognitive styles, but unlike other
lines of research focusing on system personal-
ization, they rather offer students a spectrum of
possibilities (textbook, video-lectures, practice
quizzes, problems, text slides, lecture slides) so
that each student can choose the learning strat-
egy that better suits her/him. They monitor and
observe students behaviour during the learning
process, and finally they draw conclusions on the
relative usefulness of every single resource type.
Their results show that video-lectures were very
valuable for 77% of the students, with more than
half of the students considering them one of the
two most valuable tools.
A very interesting paper by Fritze and Nor-
dkvelle (2003) analyzes the difference between
a live lecture, a video-lecture and a lecture in
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in the cases in which the blackboard is used
to complement the content of the projected
slides the video gives a clear advantage.
Recent work tends to be mostly positive in
evaluating the success of video-lectures, as shown
by the following anthology:
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“92% of students who access the video-
streamed lectures (…) agreed that this was
a useful learning resource”. (McCrohon et
al., 2001)
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“students find an added value in having a
multimedia version of the traditional lec-
ture, especially if provided through a tool
that has a well-thought user interface”
(Ronchetti, 2003b)
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video-lectures-based “distance education
was at least as good as traditional class-
room instruction” (Reisslein et al., 2005)
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for a good majority of students, “a dis-
tance learning course without on-line lec-
ture would compromise learning” Chung
(2005)
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“students have benefited from accessing
video recorded lectures” (Soong et al.,
2006)
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video-lectures “are indeed adequate alter-
natives to live lectures for engineering stu-
dents” Maness (2006)
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“the use of video (in the absence of the
teacher) in teaching primary school pupils
is as effective as when the teacher uses the
real objects in teaching Agricultural and
Environmental Sciences” Isiaka (2007)
Looking further in the past instead, early
experiments report a clear inferiority of remote
lectures when compared to in-classroom lectures
(see e.g. Hilt et al. 1999): “The Home Learning
students as well as those in the remote classroom
rated perception in a normal face-to-face lecture
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