What are the Major Strength and Weakness of Educational Video Programmes?

Strengths of Video Programmes:

(i) Television combines both sound and pictures, moving and still, grips the attention of viewers and has great motivating power.

(ii) It can bring distant objects, places, people, events and processes into the classroom.

(iii) It can magnify small objects which can be seen by several students at a time.

(iv) It can also show events in slow and fast motion.

(v) Live and dramatized situations presented through television can be used to educate the viewers.

(vi) In teaching foreign languages, the native speaker can be brought in the classroom for ideal demonstration of speech.

(vii) TV can also cut down the cost of education to some extent, if more and more pupils are allowed to have access to television programmes.

Weaknesses of Video Programmes:

Television and Video Programmes, however, suffer from a few serious drawbacks also. These are:

(i) Television is one-way medium. Once it starts, it goes on and on. It can’t stop to answer the questions or remove doubts, if any, arising in the minds of viewers. That means you cannot turn the page back and information retrieval is nil-

(ii) Television is a very expensive medium and to bring down costs, it should cater to a large number of learners, making effective programmes and using interesting formats capable of being repeated.

(iii) TV tends to make the viewers inactive and as some researches have pointed out, its continuous viewing damages the brain temporarily.

(iv) TV cannot cater to individual differences and can, at best, meet the requirement of the average group.

Steps for Overcoming the Limitations of Video Programmes: With a view to overcoming the limitations of telecasting and video cassettes, the following steps need be taken:

(i) Television, being a one-way medium, should be supported by interaction between teachers and students, once prior to and another after the telecast. This helps to generate curiosity, prepare students for reception of the ETV programmes and video cassettes and for clearing doubts, if any in the language and content transmitted therein.

(ii) There is no conclusive evidence that viewers become inactive and their brain is temporally damaged. Besides, viewing ETV/Video cassette programmes intermittently cannot do any harm to the mental or psychological make-up and condition.

(iii) ETV/Video cassettes should be made interesting and relevant to the needs of the curriculum, so that these can be made useful and the individual differences can be taken care of.

(iv) With the imaginative use of various visuals, music and electronic effects, ETV/video cassettes programmes can be made pleasant and educationally efficient.