Within the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Melbourne, lecturers are able to draw upon learning advisers of the faculty’s Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching to offer services that support student learning in their courses. These services include individual consultations, writing and study skills workshops, and course-specific sessions within or outside of course contact hours. Advisers are also involved in creating resources and in oversight of peer-learning programs, both course-specific (e.g., Peer Assisted Study Sessions aka Supplemental Instruction) and generic (e.g., the faculty’s peer writing tutor program).

Student feedback on such sessions is typically high, as reported in end-of-semester evaluation surveys. However, attendance ranges dramatically—from as few as ten students for non-course-specific workshops on writing assignments to up to 400 students in a lecture held outside of class hours on specific assignments. Low attendances for some sessions can be attributed to sessions being held at particular rooms at particular times during the week—attendance is not suitable for all students. Low attendance may be also be associated with the sessions being perceived as external to the courses, given that they are not always promoted by course staff. This may lead to students thinking of them as being of only limited relevance. Furthermore, sessions may be perceived as remedial, useful perhaps for those who are struggling, but less so for those who feel more confident about their abilities.

With such concerns in mind, the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching began creating video resources for students in conjunction with academics in specific course areas to provide students with course-specific videos that provide additional learning support outside of the students’ classes. With reference to the existence of the center’s just-in-time sessions, which involve advisers running course-specific (typically assessment-task–specific) skills sessions, these became known as “electronic just in time sessions.”

Electronic just-in-time sessions are created as short filmed conversations to be uploaded onto courses’ learning management system pages. These conversations may be between combinations of people, including learning advisers, lecturers, head tutors, tutors, and library staff. The videos can have as their focus course content (The Accounting Process), generic skills (Structuring an Essay), or course-specific skills support (Structuring the Team Assignment for Organizational Behaviour). Sessions can be used as one-off videos if tailored for assignments that are unlikely to be repeated in subsequent semesters, or they can be used over many semesters. Videos can also feature slides, stills of computer screens, and links to wikis, discussion boards, and other resources.

Unlike the Cartel Conduct and Walking the Walk videos, these videos can be produced quickly and do not require extensive technical skills or resources. While a slow zoom or some pans might be employed, the video camera may simply be left filming on the tripod with no handling. Even editing is kept simple, because conversations are short and a highly professional appearance is of less concern than the authenticity of the conversation and the value of the content.

By the end of one semester, a video for the course Accounting Reports and Analysis had been viewed 2,457 times, with 523 students (over 50 percent of the cohort) having viewed the video more than once—500 of those hits were recorded in the first two days of the video being uploaded. In a later semester, a video for a course with just over 1,000 students was viewed over 4,000 times.


These videos can be easily accessed by students (at any time and on any Web-connected platform) and have the added advantages of being more likely to be perceived as relevant and useful than sessions offered at a greater remove from the courses. While an equivalent face-to-face session might cover similar content, advice given in such a session on, say, how to approach the assignment question would be delivered only minutes before advice on structuring, writing, and then referencing the assignment. The asynchronous video version allows students to access and consider information as and when needed.

The filmed conversations draw upon multiple sources of expertise and can allow an adviser to ask the lecturer questions about expectations and tips rather than to directly address these him- or herself. The conversations can produce creative synergies between participants that may lead to the provision of rich, discipline-specific advice, and they enable a chance for implicit conventions to be made more explicit. Furthermore, such videos can model the kinds of conversations that are possible between students and lecturers about academic content. As such, the electronic just-in-time sessions constitute an example of how video can be created in-house relatively easily, cheaply, and quickly as a means to provide accessible, timely, content-rich, and targeted student support.

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