Students’ Experiences of Tippy Tube Video-assisted Learning during the COVID-19 Lockdown in an Open and Distance Learning Environment

Abstract

The University of South Africa (Unisa) College of Education (CEDU) set up Tippy Tube as an online educational video channel to engage lecturers around the country. The outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), which was declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020, imposed a lockdown period from February to August 2021. This article reports on a study that explored how the use of Tippy Tube optimised support to first-year mathematics education students at Unisa during the lockdown. Moore’s Transactional Distance Theory (TDT) underpinned the study. The study used a qualitative research design to explore students’ views on whether the Tippy Tube tool had optimised student support in the mathematics education module during the lockdown. The module has five units and five Tippy Tube videos were developed for each unit. Open-ended questionnaires were administered to 100 purposively sampled first-year mathematics education students. Only 21 respondents completed the questionnaires. Thematic analysis was then used to analyse the data from the open-ended questionnaire responses. The findings of the study revealed that Tippy Tube video-assisted learning had benefitted the students in mathematics education. Further, the study findings suggested that lecturers can consider using the Tippy Tube tool to teach students mathematics and other disciplines as they are able to replay the videos for the purpose of clarity if they did not understand the videos during live presentations.