Author: Collated Resource

FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Here are our seven main findings and corresponding recommendations for creators of online educational videos:

1. Shorter videos are much more engaging. Engagement drops sharply after 6 minutes.

Recommendation: Invest heavily in pre-production lesson planning to segment videos into chunks shorter than 6 minutes. This is the most significant recommendation!

2. Videos that intersperse an instructor’s talking head with PowerPoint slides are more engaging than showing only slides.

Recommendation: Invest in post-production editing to display the instructor’s head at opportune times in the video. But don’t go overboard because sudden transitions can be jarring. Picture-in-picture might also work well.

3. Videos produced with a more personal feel could be more engaging than high-fidelity studio recordings.

Recommendation: Try filming in an informal setting such as an office to emulate a one-on-one office hours experience. It might not be necessary to invest in big-budget studio productions.

4. Khan-style tablet drawing tutorials are more engaging than PowerPoint slides or code screencasts.

Recommendation: Introduce motion and continuous visual flow into tutorials, along with extemporaneous speaking so that students can follow along with the instructor’s thought process.

5. Even high-quality prerecorded classroom lectures are not as engaging when chopped up into short segments for a MOOC.

Recommendation: If instructors insist on recording traditional classroom lectures, they should still plan lectures with the MOOC format in mind and work closely with instructional designers who have experience in online education.

6. Videos where instructors speak fairly fast and with high enthusiasm are more engaging.

Recommendation: Coach instructors to bring out their enthusiasm and reassure them that they do not need to purposely slow down. Students can always pause the video if they want a break.

7. Students engage differently with lecture and tutorial videos.

Recommendation: For lectures, focus more on the first-time watching experience. For tutorials, add more support for rewatching and skimming, such as inserting subgoal labels in large fonts throughout the video.

Read the full paper for details.

via Philip Guo – How MOOC Video Production Affects Student Engagement.

The optimal video length is 6 minutes or shorter — students watched most of the way through these short videos. In fact, the average engagement time of any video maxes out at 6 minutes, regardless of its length. And engagement times decrease as videos lengthen: For instance, on average students spent around 3 minutes on videos that are longer than 12 minutes, which means that they engaged with less than a quarter of the content. Finally, certificate-earning students engaged more with videos, presumably because they had greater motivation to learn the material. (These findings appeared in a recent Wall Street Journal article, An Early Report Card on Massive Open Online Courses and its accompanying infographic.)

The take-home message for instructors is that, to maximize student engagement, they should work with instructional designers and video producers to break up their lectures into small, bite-sized pieces.

via Optimal Video Length for Student Engagement | edX.