Researchers Philip J. Guo from University of Rochester, Juho Kim from MIT and Rob Rubin from edX collaborated on quantitative research project to study how video production decisions affect student engagement in online educational videos. They used data from 6.9 million video watching sessions across four courses on the edX MOOC platform to measure how long students watched each video and whether they attempted to answer post-video assessment problems.
They found that shorter videos, informal talking-head videos, and Khan-style tablet drawings are much more engaging. They also found that highly produced pre-recorded classroom lectures did not engage students.
The following table provides a summary of the researchers findings and their recommendations:
We really shouldn’t be surprised by the results. When we are looking to learn something or solve a problem an authentic simply produced and presented message wins out over the highly polished and drawn out information dump. The marketing and social media world has recognized that there is an ideal length for everything online and that every piece of content should be as long as it takes to convey the message and no longer (See Internet is a Zoo Infographic).
Now that we have the hard data to support this notion academia too can start moving in the right direction when it comes to effectively using media to engage the learner.
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.
