Student-Created Screen Capture Videos as a Part of Information Systems Science Course: Learning in the Spirit of YouTube

This paper describes the screen capture videos as a complementary addition to conventional lectures in the learning of the basic concepts of information management and information systems development. Our basis is problem-based learning with the problems defined by students. The idea is that students are expected to find concepts or issues from our lecture material which are not well-defined or clarified for them. We utilize conventional lecture material, search engines on the web, and Optima e-learning environment. The solution enables a web-based seminar supporting learning in various ways. First, in our approach the students compose a Windows Media Player video focusing on the self-defined problems of the subject area. The source material for this video is collected by using search engines on the web. Second, in the web-based seminar students can familiarize themselves with the videos of other students. We claim that in this way learning can be promoted in the spirit of both cognitive and social constructivism as well as the philosophy of YouTube video service. We ran our problem-based seminar in the fall of 2006. The students worked in small groups of two or three students or they completed the coursework individually. In this seminar on the web the students had a workspace in the Optima environment for publishing their coursework videos. At the final phase of the course the students were expected to familiarize themselves with the presentations of other groups. In this paper we analyze the benefit of our problem-based seminar based on the goals of the course. At the beginning and end of the course the students were expected to analyze their own knowledge of the themes of our course. These themes were: (1) administrative view to information resources management, (2) technological view to information resources management, (3) building information systems, and (4) organizational applications. In addition, the students were expected to analyze how they experienced the coursework.