UTILIZATION OF ON-LINE LECTURE VIDEOS IN A BASIC SCIENCE COURSE.

John A. McNulty, Amy Hoyt, Ron Price Jr., Arcot Chandrasekhar, Greg Gruener, Bajune Espiritu, Ross Naheedy, Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine, Maywood, IL 60513 U.S.A.

PURPOSE: Our school recently adopted a policy making videos of all lectures available to students through a secure network. Because lecture videos are becoming increasingly popular in medical schools, we undertook an analysis of the utilization of these resources using both server logs and student surveys.

METHODS: The subjects were MS1 students (n=143) taking their course in anatomy, which had 49 total lectures. Data were collected from server logs and surveys.

RESULTS: Server logs revealed the number of lectures viewed by individual students ranged from 0-32 (x=6.2 lectures/student). About half the students viewed between 2-10 lectures; 31% viewed 0-1 lectures; 22% viewed more than 10 lectures. The number of students viewing individual lectures ranged from 1-46 (x=15.2). Students tended to view the videos away from school (76%) with peaks of activity on the weekends. Of those students who viewed 1 or more videos, 28% viewed them throughout the full extent of the course. According to the survey (47% response), they used videos primarily to fill in notes and review for exams and they tended to view them alone. Only 4% used videos to replace going to more than 5 lectures. When utilization was plotted against grade, there was a tendency for inverse correlation (Pearson’s; p=0.03) between the frequency with which videos were viewed and the final grade.

CONCLUSION: Our study shows considerable variability in the preference of students for these resources. These preliminary findings further suggest that videos are more widely used by students having difficulty with the subject matter.