Micro-Tutorial: A Strategy for Integrating Error Handling and Concept Application Skills in Traditional Micro-Lecturing Process

The teaching trend is shifting towards online learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to this, micro-lectures (MIL) are gaining popularity. Generally, assignments follow MIL to make learners comfortable with the concept explained in the MIL. So, the traditional micro-lecturing process (MILP) aims to enhance students’ concept understanding skills. However, according to Bloom’s taxonomy, understanding, application, and error handling are three fundamental skills required for students’ overall academic development. Hence, traditional MILs fail to nurture the other two skills. So, is it possible to integrate application and error handling skills in the traditional micro-lecturing process? This research provides a handle to address this research question by proposing the micro-tutorial strategy. This strategy modifies the traditional MILP by doping it with micro-tutorials (MTUT). This modified MILP is called the micro-tutorial-based MILP. This process can simultaneously enhance students’ understanding, application, and error handling skills. To prove the validity of the proposed strategy, we floated a ‘C’ programming course in which we lectured students using the proposed strategy and observed fantastic results. We believe that this research opens new dimensions for designing pedagogically effective MILs.

I. Introduction

A traditional MIL aims to explain a topic composed of concepts and sub-concepts. These concepts and sub-concepts can easily be grouped to form a structure known as knowledge point (KP). These KPs are arranged in the form of a hierarchy called KP-Hierarchy (KPH). Due to short lecturing time, the teacher focuses on lecturing elements like concept clarity, precision, lecturing speed, and many more while lecturing. Moreover, to ensure proper concept understanding to students, teachers generally give homework assignments after every MIL. Researchers often claim that the complete MILP enhances students’ concept understanding skills. However, MILs often fail to nurture students’ concept application and error handling skills. The concept application skill refers to the art of applying some known concept for solving different sets of known and unknown problems. These problem sets may contain academic, daily-life, local, global, critical, unexpected, self-created, or other problems. On the other hand, identifying and rectifying commonly occurring mistakes (or errors) while solving problems by applying the concept explained in the MIL refers to error handling skills. Is it possible to integrate error handling and concept application skills in the traditional micro-lecturing process? This research provides a handle to address this problem. The strategy proposed in this research tries to integrate concept application and error handling skills in the traditional MILP using MTUTs.