How does video production affect student engagement in MOOCs?
We measured engagement by how long students watched each video and also whether they attempted to answer post-video assessment problems.
We took all 862 videos from four edX courses offered in Fall 2012 and hand-classified each one based on its type (e.g., traditional lecture, problem-solving tutorial) and production style (e.g., PowerPoint slides, Khan-style tablet drawing, talking head). We automatically extracted other features such as length and speaking rate (words per minute). We then mined the edX server logs to obtain over 6.9 million video watching sessions from almost 128,000 students.
The lessons learned:
- Shorter videos are much more engaging. Engagement drops sharply after 6 minutes.
- Videos that intersperse an instructor’s talking head with PowerPoint slides are more engaging than showing only slides.
- Videos produced with a more personal feel could be more engaging than high-fidelity studio recordings.
- Khan-style tablet drawing tutorials are more engaging than PowerPoint slides or code screencasts.
- Even high-quality prerecorded classroom lectures are not as engaging when chopped up into short segments for a MOOC.
- Videos where instructors speak fairly fast and with high enthusiasm are more engaging.
- Students engage differently with lecture and tutorial videos.
If you’re only engaged for six minutes, you’re not even an amateur. I would call those poseurs, not students. Unless, I suppose, the videos are so bad that none of them have more than six minutes of things to say.
While I’m not opposed to designing info videos to be more engaging, they seem to want to engage the lowest common denominator. The lowest common denominators are unsuitable for university education, and targetting them will murder your MOOCs.