Videos can be an effective tool in your teaching tool kit. When incorporating videos into a lesson, it’s important to keep in mind the three key components of 1. Cognitive Load, 2. Elements that impact engagement, and 3. Elements that promote active learning. Consideration of these elements converges on a few recommendations:
Cognitive Load
Signaling is the use of on-screen text or symbols to highlight important information. For example, signaling may be provided by the appearance of two or three key words or a symbol that draws attention to areas of the screen. By highlighting the key information, it helps direct learner attention for processing in the working memory. Research has shown that this approach improves student ability to retain and transfer new knowledge.
Segmenting is the chunking of information to allow learners to engage with small pieces of new information. Segmenting can be accomplished both by making shorter videos and including “click forward” pauses within a video and annotations to provide students with a question and prompting them to click forward after completion.
Weeding is the elimination of interesting but extraneous information from the video that does not contribute to the learning goal. For example, music, complex backgrounds, or extra features within an animation require the learner to judge whether he should be paying attention to them, which increases extraneous load and can reduce learning. Research has shown that this treatment can improve retention and transfer of new information from video.
Matching modality is the process of using both the audio/verbal channel and the visual/pictorial channel to convey new information, fitting the particular type of information to the most appropriate channel. For example, showing an animation of a process on screen while narrating it uses both channels to elucidate the process, thus giving the learner dual and complementary streams of information to highlight features that should be processed in working memory. This approach has been shown to increase students’ retention and ability to transfer information and to increase student engagement with videos.
Student Engagement
Keep it short. Researchers have examined the length of time students watched streaming videos - analyzing results from 6.9 million video watching sessions – and observed that the median engagement time for videos less than six minutes long was close to 100%. As videos lengthened, however, student engagement dropped off. 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.
Use a conversational style. The use of conversational rather than formal language during multimedia instruction has been shown to have a large effect on students’ learning, perhaps because a conversational style encourages students to develop sense of social partnership with the narrator that leads to greater engagement and effort.
Speak relatively quickly and with enthusiasm. In a study examining student engagement with educational videos, researchers observed that student engagement was dependent on the narrator’s speaking rate, with student engagement increasing as speaking rate increased.
Make sure the material feels like it is for these students in this class. When reusing videos, it’s important to package them with text outside the video to contextualize them for the particular class for which they are being used. Further, it’s important to create them for the type of environment in which they will be used.
Match modality. When telling a story, it can be very effective to show the storyteller’s face or to show an animation or illustration of the story, and for math instruction showing students step-by-step with narration how to work through the problem. In both cases providing visual elements that add to the lesson can not only promote student understanding but also engagement with the lesson.
Active learning
Use guiding questions. For example, research examining the impact of guiding questions on students’ learning from a video had students in some sections of the course watch a video with no special instructions, while students in other sections of the course were provided with eight guiding questions to consider while watching. The students who answered the guiding questions while watching the video scored significantly higher on a later test.
Use interactive features that give students control. Research comparing the impact of interactive and non-interactive video on students learning in a computer science course showed that students who were able to control movement through the video, selecting important sections to review and moving backwards when desired, demonstrated better achievement of learning outcomes and greater satisfaction.
Integrate questions into the video. Incorporating questions directly into video and to providing feedback based on student responses found videos with embedded questions improved the students’ performance on subsequent quizzes.
Make video part of a larger homework assignment. Research has found that students value video and that the videos improved students’ understanding of difficult concepts when compared to a semester when the videos were not used in conjunction with the homework.
Lecture capture best practices (Educause)
Effective Educational Videos (Vanderbilt University)