In a world flooded with information, higher education faces a deceptively simple challenge: how do we help students not just consume knowledge, but co-construct it, together? Charlotte Beal’s 2025 PhD dissertation, Video Dialogues in Higher Education, offers a compelling answer. Through a design-based research (DBR) study of three cohorts of pre-service teachers, Beal introduces video-based mind maps, a hybrid learning design that entwines synchronous in-room conversations with asynchronous student-generated video dialogues.
The result is a transparent, evolving “map of understanding” that students build, interrogate, and reuse, especially relevant for oral exam preparation and for developing critical, democratic classroom practices.
From “video reflections” to a hybrid dialogic practice
Beal’s route into video as a learning tool is personal and practical. As a teacher and later as a doctoral student, she found that standard observations, field notes, and occasional screen captures were not enough to grasp the complex choreography of modern classrooms, where interactions on-screen and in-room shape each other in real time.
Early exposure to video reflections (students recording themselves thinking through the literature) revealed an underused pathway: students practising scholarly talk, making their thinking transparent to instructors before class, and building shared reference points for discussion.
That insight matured into a research question: could a video-mediated, collaborative environment help pre-service teachers develop shared conceptual understanding of demanding course readings and policy texts, and do so in ways that are democratic, dialogic, and reusable for oral exams?
The answer took shape as video-based mind maps built on a shared digital bulletin board (e.g., Padlet/Taskcards), where each group’s cluster combined a short video dialogue, a research article, policy references, practice examples, and further resources.
Design-Based Methodology: Iteration in authentic classrooms
Beal’s study is grounded in Design-Based Research (DBR), a methodology that designs, tests, and refines innovations in authentic educational settings, while generating theoretical insight. Across three iterations (2021–2022), 65 pre-service teachers worked in small groups to:
- Create video dialogues explaining key concepts from the pedagogy curriculum.
- Upload clusters (video + readings + policy + practice examples) to the whole-class mind map.
- Watch peers’ videos and record video responses, intended to advance the shared understanding, not just “like” or “evaluate” it.
- Use the map as a study resource ahead of individual oral exams.
Interaction Analysis (IA), a micro-analytic method focusing on talk, gesture, and tool use, was applied to ~80 hours of video and screen recordings to trace how meaning-making unfolded turn by turn, over time, and across groups.
Affordances, challenges, and the power to “slow talk down”
1) Deepening conceptual understanding.
Student-generated video dialogues created a rich substrate for peer engagement. Watching a video, pausing, and conversing in-room allowed groups to slow talk down, probe definitions, and test applications to school realities. This “pause–converse” rhythm promoted critical engagement, not passive viewing.
2) Making shared knowledge visible and reusable.
The mind map functioned as a knowledge object, a materialized, evolving structure of the class’s understanding. Because clusters were public and synchronized, groups could work with co-present and past voices at once: a practical route to nonlinear meaning making, where synchronous (live) and asynchronous (recorded) dialogues intersect.
3) Hybrid dialogues at group and whole-class levels.
Video responses transformed small-group talk into whole-class conversation moves. Students often positioned their responses towards specific peer groups, building inter-group chains of debate and elaboration, what Beal and Steier call dialogues on dialogues, a networked discussion that outlives the initial recording.
4) The demands of advancing knowledge through feedback.
A central challenge: asking students to produce video responses that advance peers’ ideas is hard. Without guidance, some early cohorts offered brief praise or summary. Iterations added explicit prompts (draw on theory, research, policy, practice), earlier practice with video reflection, and reading strategy support. As scaffolding improved, responses became more substantive.
Theoretical contributions: Dialogic knowledge creation and nonlinear meaning making
Beal’s work integrates four strands; dialogic, sociocultural, knowledge creation, and socio–material perspectives:
- Dialogic (Bakhtin, Linell): Meaning emerges between voices. In hybrid settings, those voices include both live speakers and “frozen” voices in video.
- Sociocultural (Vygotsky, Wertsch): Learning is socially mediated; language, tools, and artifacts shape how knowledge is constructed.
- Knowledge creation (Paavola & Hakkarainen): Focus on developing shared objects (like the mind map) that carry understanding forward.
- Socio-material (Fenwick & Landri): Materiality matters; the platform, videos, transcripts, and policy texts are actors in the learning ecology.
From this assemblage, the dissertation proposes two helpful concepts:
- Dialogic knowledge creation: hybrid conversational practices where synchronous and asynchronous voices jointly advance shared understanding.
- Nonlinear meaning making: the entanglement of past, present, and anticipated future talk, enabling students to revisit, reframe, and extend ideas across time and space.
Implications for practice: Design principles you can adopt tomorrow
For educators and program leaders, Beal distils the work into design principles:
- Constructive alignment: Tie the mind map clusters directly to course outcomes and assessment (e.g., oral exams).
- Frontload reading and reflection: Build video reflections and reading strategy sessions earlier in the semester to strengthen conceptual fluency.
- Make the map a social hub: Use a shared, synchronized platform so the whole class can see and build on emerging knowledge.
- Scaffold video responses: Provide clear prompts that require theory, policy, research, and practice connections, shifting feedback from evaluation to advancement.
- Attend to materiality and ethics: Choose GDPR-compliant tools, anonymize appropriately, and clarify consent and audience to reduce anxiety and reactivity.
Democratic classrooms in the age of GenAI
As generative AI and algorithmic feeds blur lines between credible and questionable information, Beal’s design invites students to critically negotiate knowledge with peers, openly, on record, and with multiple lenses (theory, policy, research, practice). The ability to pause, replay, and contest ideas, supported by transparent, shared artifacts, builds habits of mind that are democracy-ready and assessment-resilient.
Charlotte Beal’s video-based mind maps are more than an instructional novelty. They are a pragmatic blueprint for classrooms where knowledge is co-constructed, contested, and made visible; across voices, timescales, and modalities. For academic researchers, educators, general readers, and policy makers, the message is clear: when we design for hybrid dialogue, we equip learners not just to pass exams, but to participate thoughtfully and collaboratively in the knowledge society.
Sources
Beal, C. (2025). Video Dialogues in Higher Education: A design-based research study of pre-service teachers’ co-construction of shared knowledge [Doctoral dissertation, University of South-Eastern Norway]. (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0).Beal, C., & Hontvedt, M. (2023). Video-based mind maps in higher education: A design-based research study of pre-service teachers’ co-construction of shared knowledge. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 41, 100720. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2023.100720
