The Dual Use of Didactic Videos in STEM Education and Dissemination: A Survey-Based Analysis

Abstract

The challenges associated with the education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines can be mitigated using didactic videos, but there are other challenges when considering such potential resources. Amautas is a new platform created to facilitate the search and pedagogical integration of good-quality didactic videos, by proposing a set of structured courses while reproducing a YouTube-alike communication style and, therefore, addressing both scopes: STEM education and dissemination. To evaluate Amautas’ video-courses use and value for education and dissemination, a quantitative methodology has been followed through a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire (Cronbach’s alpha =0.906) with 489 participants. Overall findings show that the platform’s proposal has achieved a dual use of their didactic videos for education and dissemination purposes (with respective 73% and 82.6% positive responses respectively), and users declare a high positive perception of key metrics and descriptors for adequate content, format, and communicative quality. In fact, 87.9% of participants agree that the contents help them understand topics of interest, and 88.5% agree that the presentation of contents is attractive and interesting. These results show a window of opportunity for further effort investment in the curricular alignment of STEM dissemination resources, fostering their incursion in real classroom scenarios.