Diversification of adult education with the help of video lectures

For some years now, adult education and working while studying have had an important role in the modern society. Mature-age study brings with it some special features, such as time use limitations, which must be taken into account when creating educational programmes for the students concerned. Above all, flexibility must become a major feature of participation in education. In relation to the Master Studies in Mathematical Information Technology at Kokkola University Consortium, the aim for some years now has been to increase that flexibility by diversifying traditional lecture teaching with the help of real-time and on-demand video lectures. With the help of the results presented in this paper we set to evaluate the suitability of the practice used with video lectures to diversify education in circumstances where the students are working adults and, in addition, where many of them live far from the campus area. According to the results, studying with the help of videos suits well to adult working students. Introduction of videos decreases participation in face-to-face teaching, but, as a whole, participation may even increase once videos have become available. Clearly, the most common use purpose for the videos is to compensate for the absences from face-to-face teaching. Due to their flexibility, on-demand videos are particularly suitable for this purpose. Also, participation in real time education, either with the help of videos or face-to-face teaching, seems popular.