Website: Learning Technology

Effective Educational Videos

Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching

cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/effective-educational-videos/

Tom’s Recommendation

As a starter into the world of video creation this blog post touches on most of the key concepts for effective instructional video creation. It also situates videos into the instructional context rather than focusing on video creation alone.

One of the most important aspects of creating educational videos is to include elements that help promote student engagement. If students don’t watch the videos, they can’t learn from them. Lessons on promoting student engagement derive from earlier research on multimedia instruction as well as more recent work on videos used within MOOCs.

Keep it short. Guo and colleagues examined the length of time students watched streaming videos within four edX MOOCs, analyzing results from 6.9 million video watching sessions (2014). They observed that the median engagement time for videos less than six minutes long was close to 100%–that is, students tended to watch the whole video (although there are significant outliers; see the paper for more complete information). As videos lengthened, however, student engagement dropped off, such that the median engagement time with 9-12 minute videos was ~50% and the median engagement time with 12-40 minute videos was ~20%. In fact, the maximum median engagement time for a video of any length was six minutes. Making videos longer than 6-9 minutes is therefore likely to be wasted effort.

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