Using video lectures to make teaching more interactive

—Having worked for a long time with video-lectures, we devised a new teaching model that makes use of the recorded videos to free the teacher from part of his work and allowing him to concentrate his efforts on a more effective and involving teaching strategy. I. INTRODUCTION Video lectures are becoming more and more popular, especially since important educational institutions such as Princeton and MIT started collecting and making public numerous recordings. Only a few years ago such a perspective was practically impossible [1]. We started long ago playing with the idea of recording lectures [2], and over the last 6 years we collected a relatively large number of video-lectures. We also produced a tool for recording videos synchronized with PowerPoint slides, and made it freely available. The main advantages we viewed in the use of video-lectures were the ability to a) help working-students by bridging the gap given by their absence during regular lectures; b) support regular students by giving them the opportunity to recover lectures lost due to forced or elective absence; c) assist students having difficulties with the lecture's spoken language; d) give students a mean to review critical sections and check their notes.