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.

Human presence in an instructional video is important. Using a human voice as compared to a digital voice improves student learning and including a human in at least some of a video is better than not including any human embodiment at all (Mayer, 2019).

Decisions about what types of instructional media to include in a video are dependent on your instructional goals, your level of video creation expertise, and the resources you have available for video creation. For example, it is relatively easy to use a smartphone to record yourself talking; however, that may not be the best method for conveying a complex structural diagram. Keeping in mind your goals, expertise, and resources, review these different video styles to identify the format or combination of formats which would work best for your specific video creation situation.

The research is clear: online learning works best when faculty build regular, positive, and interactive relationships with students. A strategy that helps forge such a relationship is the use of videos. Student satisfaction and course engagement levels also increase with the use of instructor-generated videos – the subject of this book. Beginning by outlining the different types of videos you can create, and what the research says about their effectiveness, Karen Costa explains how they can be designed to reinforce learning, to align with and promote course outcomes, and to save you time across your courses. She then describes how to create successful videos with commonly available technologies such as your smartphone, and without a major investment of time, demonstrating the simple steps she took to develop her bank of videos and build her confidence to deliver short, straightforward learning aids that are effective and personal. Embedded QR codes in the text enable you to view sample videos and screencasts that bring the book’s advice to life as you read. If you’ve been wanting to include videos in your teaching but haven’t found the time or confidence, this book will help you to develop a simple and sustainable video development process, supporting both your success and the success of your students.

Although there have been massive changes in video technology over the last 25 years, resulting in dramatic reductions in the costs of both creating and distributing video, the unique educational characteristics are largely unaffected. (More recent computer-generated media such as simulations, will be analysed under ‘Computing’, in Section 8.5).

Video is a much richer medium than either text or audio, as in addition to its ability to offer text and sound, it can also offer dynamic or moving pictures. Thus while it can offer all the affordances of audio, and some of text, it also has unique pedagogical characteristics of its own. Once again, there has been considerable research on the use of video in education, and again I will be drawing on research from the Open University (Bates, 1984; 2005; Koumi, 2006) as well as from Mayer (2020).

This review summarizes our progress over the past 30 years in understanding how to help people learn in technology‐rich environments and suggests some productive paths for future research. In particular, I provide a brief history of developments in creating a research‐based theory of how people learn with media (i.e., science of learning), how to help people learn with media (i.e., science of instruction), and how to determine what people have learned with media (i.e., science of assessment).