Guo, P., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. Paper presented at the 41-50. doi:10.1145/2556325.2566239
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Abstract
Videos are a widely-used kind of resource for online learning. This paper presents an empirical study of how video production decisions affect student engagement in online educational videos. To our knowledge, ours is the largest-scale study of video engagement to date, using data from 6.9 million video watching sessions across four courses on the edX MOOC platform. We measure engagement by how long students are watching each video, and whether they attempt to answer post-video assessment problems.
Our main findings are that shorter videos are much more engaging, that informal talking-head videos are more engaging, that Khan-style tablet drawings are more engaging, that even high-quality pre-recorded classroom lectures might not make for engaging online videos, and that students engage differently with lecture and tutorial videos.
Based upon these quantitative findings and qualitative insights from interviews with edX staff, we developed a set of recommendations to help instructors and video producers take better advantage of the online video format. Finally, to enable researchers to reproduce and build upon our findings, we have made our anonymized video watching data set and analysis scripts public. To our knowledge, ours is one of the first public data sets on MOOC resource usage.
Annotation
Guo, Kim and Rubin conducted a large-scale, mixed-methods study to analyze both quantitative and qualitative results regarding how video production decisions affect engagement levels. Engagement is measured by the authors through two means- engagement time with the video, and whether the student completed the assessment activities following. The authors acknowledge the difficulty of measuring “true” engagement without direct observation, as well as the limitation of studying historical data which may affect generalizability. Although focused on MOOCs, the authors provide a useful set of recommendations that can be applied to various video production designs in order to boost student engagement. For example, the authors recommend that the talking speed and enthusiasm of the instructor, as well as free-hand drawing as opposed to PowerPoint slides can lead to greater engagement levels (you may wish to refer to the Lightboard post available in the Toolbox).
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