Use of instructional videos in leadership education in higher education under COVID-19: A qualitative study

Since 2012/13 academic year, we have implemented a leadership course entitled “Tomor- row’s Leaders” for undergraduate students at a Hong Kong university. The positive youth development (PYD) approach was used in the development of this course, which emphasizes fostering of adolescents’ cognitive, emotional and social competences to ensure successful childhood-to-adulthood advancement [33, 34]. The “Tomorrow’s Leaders” course aimed at enhancing university students’ intra- and interpersonal competences to equip them to meet the changing needs for success in the 21st century [35]. Moreover, this course was intended to promote university students’ leadership qualities, so they could be leaders for themselves (i.e., self-leadership) and lead others within their social circles [36]. In the “Tomorrow’s Leaders” course, we have developed videos based on various PYD attributes, including self-leadership, cognitive competence, social-emotional competence, resilience, moral competence, spiritual- ity, law-abiding leadership, cultural competence, effective communication, and team building. Empirical studies argued that leadership qualities, including self-leadership, psychosocial com- petencies, interpersonal relationships, problem solving, conflict resolution, and stress manage- ment, played a key role in strengthening children’s and adolescents’ mental health [37–39]. Besides, some leadership qualities such as resilience and psychosocial competence can be regarded as integral components of mental health. Because of the close connection between

adolescents’ leadership qualities and their mental health, this study could provide implications for public health. Our previous evaluation study of this course showed that students had signif- icant positive changes in a number of PYD attributes after taking the course [40], and high sat- isfaction with the course content, course design, teaching methods, and teaching and learning effectiveness [41, 42]. Under the pandemic, the delivery of this course was changed from face- to-face mode to online teaching or HyFlex learning (i.e., a flexible combination of online and face-to-face teaching) [43, 44]. In view of the benefits of instructional videos, a research project was implemented to develop virtual teaching and learning materials for the “Tomorrow’s Leaders” course, with 15 theory-related videos and 9 scenario-based videos produced to facili- tate students’ learning in this course. The details of the videos can be seen in Shek et al. [45]. After the development of the 15 theory-related videos and the 9 scenario-based videos, we evaluated the quality of the videos by employing the subjective outcome evaluation method via the client satisfaction approach. Our first study was conducted in Semester 2 of 2021/22 aca- demic year, in which the course was delivered in an online synchronous mode. Two subjective outcome evaluation scales (SOES) were developed to assess students’ views of the theory- related videos and the scenario-based videos, respectively. More than 90% of the students per-

ceived that the videos could promote their interest, understanding and reflection of the subject matter, and were beneficial to their development [46]. Furthermore, we replicated the study in Semester 1 of 2022/23 academic year in order to analyze students’ perceptions of the 24 videos under face-to-face teaching mode. Using the same measures, the second study found that stu- dents’ evaluation of the video quality and benefits received from watching the videos were sig- nificantly improved [47]. Although the two subjective outcome evaluation studies showed that students had highly positive appraisal of the 24 videos, there was a need to use qualitative evaluation strategies to further understand students’ perceptions of and experience in watching the videos in this course. Qualitative research examines the nature of human experience and the meaning of cer- tain phenomena to individuals, so that individuals’ interpretation and explanation of the “what”, “how” and “why” of a phenomenon could be explored [48]. For education research, it was stressed that qualitative research could comprehensively explain human beings’ psycho- logical dimensions and the nature of their complex behaviors [49]. Moreover, focus group interview is an effective qualitative method to examine a particular issue in which a group of participants have experienced together. It is suitable when researchers seek to obtain a range of PLOS ONE Qualitative evaluation of virtual teaching and learning videos in leadership education

PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291861 September 21, 2023 3 / 28