Artificial-Voice-Based Conversational Lecture Video Clips for Flipped Classroom

The flipped classroom is known as an effective teaching method, particularly for subjects that largely weigh on the exercises. This learning method devotes the class to exercises, whereas the lecture is left to the students’ self-study before the class. Therefore, the quality improvement of the self-study has been the major issue for the success of the flipped classroom because the students can easily lose motivation due to the lack of interactive involvement during the lecture. Conventionally, textbooks or teachers’ prerecorded lecture videos are commonly provided for self-study. However, these materials are often designed for the efficient display of knowledge but scarcely contain discussion, which may fail to evoke the students’ feeling of active involvement in the lecture. This paper addresses this issue by utilizing artificial voice for self-study lecture videos. The artificial voice is used for presenting knowledge through the artificial discussion of multiple persons of a similar age to the students. The teacher designs and creates this discussion carefully to make the lecture appear familiar to the students, thus motivating the students to the topic of the lecture. Along with highlighting the technology of the artificial voice for making the lecture videos, this paper also reports an actual flipped classroom utilizing the lecture videos of artificial discussion, which supports the positive effect of motivating the students and improving their understanding.