(589b) Student-Created Youtube Videos, a Multimedia Assignment, Improves Engaged Student Learning Outcomes in a Large Engineering Classroom

Starting in the Fall 2014 semester, groups of 4-5 junior Chemical Engineering students were challenged to create informative and captivating YouTube videos of a transport phenomenon highlighting a mass or heat transfer principle that they learned in the ChE 342 classroom or beyond. This innovative ChE342 course project has not only successfully transformed boring deductive classroom teaching into social sharing of engineering principles, but also led to the creation of a YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBpw-AyX_Sw8EVsKObSiUVw) “The Fun of Mass and Heat Transfer” as a global outreach platform. While we initially demonstrated the effectiveness and statistically significant impact of this teaching innovation on student learning (Chemical Engineering Education, 2016 50(3), 186-192), we sought to further investigate how this multimedia assignment affects specific engaged student learning outcomes including teamwork and communication, creativity, self-agency, risk taking and social awareness.

Towards this goal, during the course offering in 2016, 2017 and 2018, students were given the choice between creating a YouTube video and presenting a poster for their project, resulting in two cohorts to elucidate the effect of a multimedia assignment over conventional means on engaged learning outcomes. By conducting focus group studies and pre/post project surveys of these two cohorts, we obtained quantitative and qualitative data suggesting that the multimedia assignment had a statistically significantly greater impact on student creativity and risk taking than the poster presentation. Taken together, the Student-created YouTube Video represents an effective, scalable and sustainable teaching innovation, which not only allows students to showcase their work to a much broader audience but offers unique advantages for improving specific engaged learning outcomes.