Digital education reading group: May 2024
What makes a good educational video? Does this align with what students like? What does this tell us? We will explore this in more detail in this month’s digital education reading group. Elizabeth Kingston is our curator this month and has prepared the following excellent resources with James Kyle. Looking forward to this one!
What’s the best way to use video in online learning? This question often provokes strong and opposing opinions, and research in the area is frequently contradictory. Some believe we’re conditioned to associate video with passive consumption, that the medium only caters to surface learners. Others believe that with the proper planning and implementation, plus an active approach to learning, video content can prove more effective than in-person learning.
This month’s reading suggests that effective video content needs to be:
- Short (5-10 mins)
- Focus on one complete knowledge point
- Planned in advance
- Used for active learning in some way (e.g. followed by quiz, reflective questions, poll etc)
- Part of a structured course that takes an active approach to learning
To what extent might this represent a departure from what our academic partners are used to creating for their current teaching?
What about our students? How do they fit in? We know that students’ judgement of their own learning is often inaccurate; learning experiences that minimise effort increase student estimates of their own learning, but do not always lead to actual learning (Carpenter et al., 2020). In this case what is the balance between giving students what they want and what they need to learn? Is the customer always right?
Questions for us to consider
- What are your experiences with learning with video? How do you learn best with video?
- What makes a good educational video?
- How might we strike a balance between what students want and what the evidence indicates they need to learn?
- Delivering effective video content can require a good deal of planning. Where might the balance be between supporting time poor academic partners and striving for best practice.
- How might teaching with video differ between subject areas?
Resources
A collection of resources gathered by Elizabeth Kingston, James Kyle and Anna Armstrong.
1. Advance HE (2023) Student Academic Experience Survey – 2023
Focused on in-person undergraduate degree programmes, but page 30 gives some encouraging indications of students wanting to move away from a passive approach to learning.
2. Trenholm, S. (2021) Why too many recorded lecture videos may be bad for maths students’ learning
A Wonkhe article from a few years ago exploring whether videos depress learning. Compares studies in the UK and Australia.
3. Guo, P. et al. (2014) How video production affects student engagement: an empirical study of MOOC variants
Paper presented at the first Learning @ scale conference. Interesting slides on a study exploring how video production affects engagement. Indicates a preference for shorter videos and more time spent in pre-production as well as an informal approach (ideally with ‘talking heads’) trumping high-end studio production. Also sings the praises of hand draw slides, which would present a challenge with accessibility.
4. Zhu, J. et al. (2022) The impact of short videos on student performance in an online-flipped college engineering course
An interesting study which focuses on the use of video in flipped classroom teaching for engineering students (during the pandemic). Indicates that short videos are the most engaging and have the potential to enhance academic performance. Also highlights that to be effective, videos must focus only on one knowledge point and must link to an activity.
5. Wilson, K. et al. (2018) Instructor presence effect: Liking does not always lead to learning
The study examines whether visuals of instructors in online video lectures enhance learning. Experiments showed that while instructor visuals did not reduce mind wandering or improve comprehension, they actually impaired comprehension. Despite this, learners preferred and believed they learned more effectively with instructor visuals, revealing a discrepancy between subjective preferences and actual learning outcomes, termed the Instructor Presence Effect.
6. Carpenter, S. et al. (2020) On Students’ (Mis)judgments of Learning and Teaching Effectiveness
Full article available with your UoL Open Athens library account, or read a short version on the web page. Students often overestimate their learning due to intuitive but misleading factors like engaging instructors and polished lectures, which don’t always enhance actual comprehension. Student evaluations, biased by factors such as an instructor’s gender and attractiveness, poorly predict real learning outcomes. A reliance on student feedback for faculty decisions may promote teaching methods that improve ratings but harm academic success.
7. Brame, C. and Perez, K. (2017) Effective Educational Videos: Principles and Guidelines for Maximizing Student Learning from Video Content
Some excellent evidence based advice on what makes an effective educational video. Practical recommendations include keeping videos brief, using complementary audio and visual elements, employing signalling, maintaining a conversational and enthusiastic style, and embedding videos in active learning contexts with guiding questions or interactive elements.
List of topics discussed at previous meetings
