Abstract: This paper seeks to
explore the impact of video lectures on the students of the Department
of English of a Bangladeshi private university during the world
pandemic, COVID-19. Using various online resources, especially YouTube
videos, website links, e-texts, and journal articles, to make a
classroom vibrant, interesting, engaging, and entertaining and to
disseminate the best possible knowledge among students was the common
trend in the classrooms of the English Department of Daffodil
International University (DIU) before the pandemic. However, using
teacher-developed materials in the classroom was not a regular
phenomenon in the culture of higher education in Bangladesh,
particularly in the Department of English at DIU. This paper will
explore what kind of positive motivation this shift brought to get the
students more engaged in the classroom during the worldwide crisis. It
will also discuss whether the teacher-made video lectures helped
students understand the topic(s) better. This study intends to address
these issues besides inspecting the general pros and cons of using such
materials in a tertiary classroom. The data were collected through
close-ended and open-ended questionnaires from the selected students and
analyzed using qualitative and quantitative research methods. The
researchers hypothesized that teacher-made video lectures were more
effective given that students’ and instructors’ similar stress and
intonation, pronunciation, and cultural experiences which helped
learners comprehend the lesson topics in comparison with materials
prepared commercially. This paper also highlights the students'
expectations and satisfaction, particularly related to the video
lectures made by teachers compared to those taken from popular online
resources.