Peer Review

Clips for Class

Material Detail page

Reviewed:: Nov 29, 2017 by Psychology

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

This site serves as a collection of educational videos curated from YouTube. Representing 18 psychology subdisciplines, these videos are prefaced with a brief introduction and additional related educational content.

"The website offers the following description: "We created this resource in response to a request we hear from teachers, instructors, and college professors that they would love to have more video...We launched an extensive search for videos and clips of content on the internet that can be used both in class and by students at home. The videos range from news clips, documentaries, popular TV shows, to student projects, and represent many fields of study and areas of interest..."

Type of Material:

Collection

Recommended Uses:

The site is designed for use primarily by faculty members (who would provide students with direct links to individual videos/sites).

The videos can be used as in-class supplements, assignment prompts, or instructional tools for online classes. Each video link includes a brief summary of the video. It is up to instructors to find videos relevant to their unique instructional needs.

Technical Requirements:

No special skills are required. Viewing the videos requires audio and video capabilities. Most videos could be viewed with no problem on a PC with Windows 10 on either Chrome or Firefox. Some videos are no longer available and/or private (not viewable). The majority of videos are linked from YouTube, and a smaller number are linked from individual sites.

Identify Major Learning Goals:

The purpose of this website is to provide a collection of videos (categorized by psychology sub-field) for instructors to use as classroom or online supplements. Video categories include: Abnormal, Biological, Cognition, Consciousness, Developmental, Emotion Health, I/O, Language, Learning, Memory, Motivation, Personality, Research, S & P, Sexuality, Social, and Statistics.

Target Student Population:

The videos are appropriate for students at both the high school and college levels.

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

Instructors need to have a general idea of what they are looking for in order to locate videos that align with instructional goals. However, most videos do not detail any specialized information, and prerequisite knowledge of the field of psychology is not necessary for students to understand them.

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

The most valuable aspect of this collection is that the authors have spent time collecting a handful of videos relevant to each of the 18 disciplines. A number of the videos are historical (older) and provide insight into original psychological research that may be useful to students who are new to the field of psychology or who are learning specifically about the history of theories and theorists.

It appears as though videos are still being actively added to the site.

Concerns:

The quality of individual videos varies dramatically (as does the length and value of each video). It is not clear what criteria are used to add videos to the site (although the site contains a statement that encourages users to submit a potential video for inclusion). While most videos are still active, there are a number of broken links or links to private/non-viewable videos.

The content provided in the videos, while relevant, is often minimal in nature with only a handful of videos available in certain sub-disciplines.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:
Strengths:: The primary benefit of this particular site is that it will aid faculty in further highlighting difficult concepts that may be more challenging to teach without a video demonstration. The content is wide-ranging, and many of the videos are interesting and engaging.
Concerns:: While the site incorporates a lead-in description for many videos, it is up to the instructor to watch each video and determine its relevance in relation to course-related or assignment-related learning objectives.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

Sub-disciplines are clearly labeled within the main page of the site. The site is easy to navigate.

Included videos appear to be sourced from YouTube and have closed captioning, which is an important benefit.

Concerns:

The site appears overloaded with Google ads, which hinders navigation. Navigation through each of the sub-disciplines inevitably results in clicking Google ads, and there is no back button/return functionality allowing a return to the original website. It would be beneficial for the authors of this page to scale back the usage of Google ads.

The quality of the some of the presented videos is poor. In part, this quality concern relates to the age of the films, but some videos appear to have been modified from an original format and have possibly lost significant quality in the conversion.

Other Issues and Comments:: For the purposes of allowing students to view a wide range of videos relating to varied psychology content, this site possesses value to both faculty and students.
Creative Commons: