Course: Legal Psychology
Instructor: Pekka Santtila
Students Enrolled: 20
Technology used: NYU Zoom, NYU Stream, NYU Classes
Pekka Santtila is currently teaching Legal Psychology to 20 students in China, Europe, and the United States from Finland. He is using NYU Stream to pre-record lectures with embedded video quizzes to encourage student engagement.
Instead of uploading one long lecture on NYU Stream, Santtila has broken each lecture into five to nine short lectures so that students can absorb the knowledge at their own pace. Santtila says that the subject of Legal Psychology has adapted well to a distance learning mode because he normally uses a number of video demonstrations in a classroom setting, and these demos can be adapted to pre-recorded video lectures.
When students are watching each video, they must answer multiple choice and open-ended questions to proceed with the video. Santtila says he always comments on student responses to open-ended questions so that they know that he is reading their answers.
Screenshots taken from one of Santtila’s lecture clips (3 min 27 secs) on eye-witness identification, in which students “witness” a crime happening, learn about the concept of a “target-absent line-up,” and then proceed to answer a multiple choice question where they must identify who they believe to be the perpetrator from a line-up, and then answer several open-ended questions reflecting on the activity in the video. The video used is from Gary Wells.
Santtila also hosts forum discussions on NYU Classes for topics which cannot be explored sufficiently in the short-answer format of NYU Stream Video Quizzes. He also posts multiple choice questions about chapter readings on NYU Classes, and holds three meetings per week on NYU Zoom to discuss readings and what students have learned. Students can choose the Zoom session that best suits their schedules and time zones. By engaging with students via Zoom sessions, Santtila hopes to increase student motivation to complete all tasks by their deadlines.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
Santtila says it is time consuming to read all of the students’ comments and answer them, especially because students answer open-ended questions on several platforms and also turn in written assignments. He recommends carefully considering how to automate feedback components before implementing a similar methodology, due to the time-consuming nature of in-person feedback.
An additional challenge is conveying enthusiasm in pre-recorded video lectures due to the lack of student/faculty interaction.