How video production affects student engagement: an empirical study of MOOC videos

By Philip J. Guo, Juho Kim, Rob Rubin. ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale, 2014

2,059 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/409090a8fa7edfededc03c396a16f6f57144270c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Science Applications

1. C. Brame
2. Rob Miller
3. Been Kim
4. Michael S. Bernstein
5. Adam Marcus
6. James Lehman
7. Yizhou Qian

In Education

1. C. Brame
2. Krzysztof Z Gajos
3. Philip J. Guo

Citations in the corpus

• Understanding in-video dropouts and interaction peaks inonline lecture videos (2014, background): “A recent analysis of edX data [10] shows that learner engagement drops significantly if the video length is longer than 6 minutes.”
• Student Engagement Predictions in an e-Learning System and Their Impact on Student Course Assessment Scores (2018, background): “[37] studied student engagement while students watched videos.”
• Effective Educational Videos: Principles and Guidelines for Maximizing Student Learning from Video Content (2016, background): “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 (Guo et al., 2014).”
• Perceptions of medical students towards online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic: a national cross-sectional survey of 2721 UK medical students (2020, background): “Hence, we suggest that until innovative solutions are generated, medical schools adopt TBL or PBL learning styles for efficiently delivering high-yielded teaching.”