USING COMICAL ONLINE VIDEOS WITH POP-CULTURE REFERENCES TO TEACH INTRODUCTORY GEOLOGY

Short (~ 10 minutes or less), comical, animated videos describing introductory geology concepts and processes were created to supplement online content for a hybrid Introductory Geology course at Arizona State University. These videos were developed by graduate research assistants using content from the Exploring Geology textbook by Reynolds and others. The graduate-student developers were encouraged to make videos that were creative, comical, and culturally current to better engage the undergraduate student viewers. At the end of the semester, students enrolled in the Introductory Geology hybrid course provided anonymous feedback about the videos by completing 21 online, Likert-type scale questions and one free-response question. Nearly 80% of students surveyed said that the videos were either very helpful or somewhat helpful for learning content. Eighty four percent of students agreed or strongly agreed that the humorous parts were not distracting and ninety percent said the humor either somewhat or significantly increased their enjoyment of the videos. Additionally, 75% of students surveyed said that the humorous parts made them more likely to watch the videos. Students additionally provided positive feedback on the free-response survey questions. One student, for example, conveyed his or her enthusiasm with the following comment, “We are college students and it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that when things are enjoyable we are much more likely to do them!!! If you take the humor out of the movies, I will probably not watch them and even if I did I wouldn’t pay attention.” One takeaway from our experience with these videos is the importance of having graduate students, not faculty, design and develop them to better match the culture of the intended users. These videos are available at http://reynolds.asu.edu/101_redesign/.