How can we engage students to watch online videos? This presentation shares research findings and recommendations regarding the effectiveness of online videos, which cost institutions hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, have become a must-have in online education, and are highly used in learning strategies like flipped learning.
An instructor designing a online course is told by their instructional designer, “Your video lectures are too long, and they need to be cut to be between four and 10 minutes.” But why exactly? The purpose of this presentation is to offer recently collected data and a summary of current literature that can serve to underpin the consultative advice instructional designers offer to faculty designing courses.
Online courses have relied heavily on instructor-created videos as content lectures and to create a measure of instructor presence. Instructors have devoted time to record these videos whether in a studio with assistance or on their own in their own homes or offices. Instructional design shops have devoted time to collaborate with faculty to prepare for the lectures, whether it be preparing scripts, setting up demonstrations, and going on site for a recording. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent to close caption lectures to meet accessibility requirements. But how dedicated are students to watching these videos? Despite the dedication of faculty and instructional designers to creating lectures given through videos, Guo, Kim, and Rubin (2014) have indicated that students’ engagement in the form of their attention is at most six minutes. The online multimedia resource of Khan Academy has considered six to 10 minutes to be the optimal video length (Tolks et al., 2016). If the videos are visually rich in supporting the content, students’ attention may be kept for 20 minutes (Handke & Franke, 2013). Nevertheless, with the improvement of internet access and the use and the further development of video platforms in the last five years, the question of student engagement with video persists: How long do students engage with instructor-created videos? Why do students remain engaged with some videos and not others? Is there really an optimal video length?
A research team from the University of Florida Center for Online Innovation and Production (COIP), which is responsible for the production and support of UF Online and Distance and Continuing Education, is investigating these questions. The research design includes the evaluation of videos for at least 150 UF Online courses housed in the university’s video platform, Mediasite. Additionally, the videos for students in non-traditional settings like flexible learning and professional development are also being evaluated.
In this 45-minute session, the presenters will discuss findings regarding how video data analytics are being used to inform instructors and instructional designers in different subject areas, while addressing steps for planning and crafting online education videos.
References:
Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014, March). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of mooc videos. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning@ scale conference (pp. 41-50). ACM.
Handke, J., & Franke, P. (2013). xMOOCs im Virtual Linguistics Campus. Schulmeister R, Herausgeber. MOOCs-Massive Open Online Courses: Offene Bildung oder Geschäftsmodell, 101-126.
Tolks, D., Schäfer, C., Raupach, T., Kruse, L., Sarikas, A., Gerhardt-Szép, S., ... & Sostmann, K. (2016). An introduction to the inverted/flipped classroom model in education and advanced training in medicine and in the healthcare professions. GMS journal for medical education, 33(3).