I.J. Modern Education and Computer Science, 2017, 5, 17-26 Published Online May 2017 in MECS (http://www.mecs-press.org/) DOI: 10.5815/ijmecs.2017.05.03 Copyright © 2017 MECS I.J. Modern Education and Computer Science, 2017, 5, 17-26 Experiences from Video Lectures in Software Engineering Education Antti Herala and Antti Knutas Lappeenranta University of Technology, Lappeenranta, 53850, Finland E-mail: firstname.lastname@lut.fi Erno Vanhala University of Tampere, Tampere, 33100, Tampere E-mail: firsname.lastname@uta.fi Jussi Kasurinen South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences, Kotka, 48220, Finland E-mail: firstname.lastname@xamk.fi Abstract—Millennials have learned to seek information from the Internet whenever they need to know something and want to learn things. In this study, we present observations from several university courses with freely available online resources for the modern students. Ten different courses with video lectures were observed, often with positive outcomes and improved results compared to the previous course arrangements. Additionally, unlike in some previous literature, we observed that some issues such as the video length did not have a meaningful impact on the learning outcomes. Overall, the results indicate that videos offer excellent benefit-effort-ratio, and are an efficient way to reach the target audience: the students. Index Terms—Teaching, software engineering, video lectures, user statistics, experience report. I. INTRODUCTION Even though software engineering and programming has been taught for several decades, there are some constants in the computer science education: learning computer science is rather difficult, and the motivational aspects need to be addressed to get the best learning results (for example [1]). During the last decade, different forms of community support in programming has become increasingly accessible to all different users. For example, programming manuals from libraries are losing popularity, because the students can find answers to virtually any software problem from the online services such as Stack Overflow [2]. In addition to textual answers to a specific issue, these repositories of knowledge can also include complete programming manuals with exercises, even including tutorials and entire video lectures covering various programming languages, techniques, and platforms. The depth and technical level of the works also vary to support student learning in various school levels from an elementary school to the graduate level at an university. The availability of video learning material varies, with some being available only to students participating in a course, and some are available to a global audience in services like YouTube. Most of the articles regarding the video usage in MOOCs and student attention span suggest that the educational video length should be around six minutes [3]. However, in the case of flipped classroom, the length recommendation is longer, usually around 15-30 minutes [4,5]. Both the MOOC and the flipped classroom are using similar video techniques. This raises the question regarding different recommendations for the video lengths, and as a secondary concern, the issue of how these video lectures perform when compared against traditional classroom lecturing methods? If the course infrastructure in the flipped classroom allows the students to focus more on the material and the topic, would it be a preferable to MOOCs? If the video lectures, in general, perform better than their traditional counterparts, the benefits of aspects such as increased accessibility would make this a significant advancement in teaching infrastructure. These issues lead us to define four main research questions, which are listed as follows. 1) How does the video usage differ between an MOOC and flipped classroom? 2) What are the differences of lecture videos and tutorial videos in the scope of video usage? 3) What general requirements can be identified for the video-based course infrastructures in the development of effective long-distance learning solutions? 4) What are the benefits of widely available teaching videos for teachers and organizations? II. RELATED RESEARCH In the context of education and especially video-based instructions, students are given a chance to learn in an environment of their choosing. Some researchers in the