Courmos: An Educational Video Tutorial App
Coursmos is an educational app designed to be a platform that brings education producers and consumers together. However, Courmos is promoting (and perhaps coining?) this idea of “microlearning”. The set up at Coursmos is such that content developers create mini tutorials for whatever concept they’re trying to teach in a series of 2-3 minute video chapters. Coursmos claims that they are trying to address the attrition rate so often associated with online courses, as dropout and failure rates are extremely high for this educational medium. The Courmos team contends that this is due to lack of time and concentration, and proposes short mini tutorial videos as a fix. Content producers can then decide to charge for their course, or release it for free. The learning topics available vary from make-up lessons to introduction to computer science topics.
While I think I personally disagree with their rationale for “microlearning,” (I think lack of concentration and time are only a few factors that create high attrition and completion rates for online courses), I think user generated content for learning materials is a popular and increasingly popular idea.
At Coursmos, teachers can require that interested candidates pay for access to their course. Coursmos has a recommended rate of between 1 and 5 dollars per course, taking a 30 % surcharge, and leaving the teacher with 70% of the revenue. This seems comparable to similar platform services that I’ve seen.
Course developers create their video tutorials on a sleek and user-friendly interface. First, teachers create a title and description for their courses, and finally choose a category from the scroll menu at the bottom.
Then teachers decide whether to shoot a video or upload a video from a preexisting file. The platform
is designed for videos of between two to three minutes in length, but can hold longer videos as well. Once the teacher is satisfied with their lesson, they can press ‘Save Lesson’ to continue adding video chapters to complete their tutorial.
As seen here, the mobile editor is extremely user friendly and has high quality output. The small video chunks are easy to download and keep the broken up content well organized and easily ‘resume-able’, especially as you’re able to export these mini-videos directly to your cellphone.
Integration with their online page works well, and coursmos does a great job of classifying your interests and course progress, allowing you to list courses you’re interested in and tracking your progress through various courses.
The large amount of material available at Coursmos makes it useful for many learners and educators, in many disciplines. Other than Udemy, this is the only hosting site for video tutorials that I’ve seen that can be used completely free of charge.
Another aspect of Courmos that I like is that it encourages teacher-teacher collaboration, as after each video chapter, viewers are given the opportunity to add “extensions” or extra video content related to the same theme that was represented in that section of the course. However, I’ve seen few extensions, and think this is somewhat flawed in its creation, as students are likely the ones to be reviewing the courses, so they should be the ones adding more content.
Critiques / Recommendations:
One issue I have with this course is that I don’t think mini tutorials will solve the problem of poor completion rates for online learners. One of the biggest issues that exists in the field I believe is lack of interaction. The fact that the video tutorials at Coursmos have been made more efficient does not create more interaction, and I think that this is essentially what’s at the root of the online ed problem. One way this might be partially addressed in the Coursmos app is by allowing students to use the ‘extension’ space as a community participation board, where they can discuss issues and demonstrate solutions.
Another issue I have is that there is only one form of content delivery available for this App. It seems like it wouldn’t be difficult to also include branches of reading and listening materials, but as of now, only video content is available. I also think it would be beneficial, although somewhat cliché to add on a practice section, where teachers could create standard practice activities that include multiple choice, drag and drop, or fill in the blank type activities.
Since all the output is based on video guides, it might also be useful for student to have a ‘note-taking’ section, where they can easily access a text component to write down useful facts they gain from the sections, and access this across video files. This will allow students to combine multiple resources on similar topics in a useful way. Another way this might be done is by adding a “bookmark” feature for tagging even smaller sections of a tutorial, and housing this in a personal file that the student can name and create for later reference and compiling resources.
I also think that the courses could generally be more effectively categorized with subtopics and more robust search filters, but overall I am impressed with the video download capability and wide variety of learning content available on the site.
