Engaging graduate students through online lecture creation

We propose a new active learning activity called “slecture” (a contraction of the words “student” and “lecture”). In this activity, students create online lectures based on the in-class lectures of their course instructor, and post these online lectures on a publicly accessible website. As an experiment, slectures were integrated into the mandatory assignments of a large engineering graduate course with a diverse student population. In our implementation, the students were free to pick the topic (from a list provided by the instructor), medium, and language of instruction. The students´ slectures were peer-reviewed at the end of the semester, and full credit was given for timely completion of the assignment. In a semester-end survey, students indicated that they learned more from making a slecture than from the other active learning techniques employed throughout the course. Furthermore, nearly 60% of the students rated the learning value of making a slecture at least as high as that of attending the lectures. The high level of enthusiasm for the slecture creation, especially among students who rated the learning value of the classroom lectures lower than the rest of the class, suggests that this activity may be a good way to engage students and stimulate learning.