Since the pandemic, learning from video has become more and more applied in secondary classrooms. In some quarters there were concerns that the demands of learning from video are different than the consumption of video for entertainment that most students engaged in such that student engagement with video lessons would likely be shallow. This shallowing hypothesis has not been consistently supported in the research, however (P. Delgado · Ø. Anmarkrud · V. Avila · L. Altamura · S. M. Chireac · A. Pérez · L. Salmerón).
It is certainly true that students viewing a video that is more than some six minutes long may find their mind wandering, but there are effective methods to teach students that skill set necessary to learn from video and to maximize the benefit.
Effective use of video as an educational tool is enhanced when instructors consider three elements: how to manage cognitive load of the video; how to maximize student engagement with the video; and how to promote active learning from the video.
Brame
1. The Innovation “Etude” Maximizes Active Learning
Innovation’s Etude is an app that maximizes active learning from video. I used this myself extensively with an 11th grade US History class in the 2021-2022 school year. The Etude is a research-supported application that takes a little time to create, but once done is there for your students year after year. Studies show that students who complete video-based learning tasks with students that include interpolated questions performed significantly better on subsequent tests of the material and reported less mind wandering that those who watched passively (Brame).
Teachers using the Etude to create video lessons can opt to add questions in multiple-choice or short answer format. These serve as guiding questions. Providing guiding questions to students promotes active learning by “share[ing] learning objectives with students, thus increasing the germane load of the learning task and reducing the extraneous load by focusing student attention on important elements. (Brame).” Some of my students liked to run down the questions and answer them before watching the video. They would then correct the wrong responses as they watched the video. This is a highly effective method that I encouraged all students to do.
In an Etude, questions do not appear unexpectedly in a dialogue box to interrupt the video like at some websites. Teachers can opt to set a cue point for their questions so that the question becomes highlighted at the right time when the video has given the answer. the video pauses gently while the student responds.
Students engaged in an Etude lesson can control the video playback and are encouraged to re-watch when they need to. Studies show that “[s]tudents who were able to control movement through the video, selecting important sections to review and moving backward when desired, demonstrated better achievement of learning outcomes and greater satisfaction.” (Brame)
The Etudes are self-scoring for multiple-choice and there is an AI grading assistant to help teachers score short answer questions that is easy to train. The scoring app is designed for maximum efficiency. instead of scoring a whole student page at a time, the scoring app prompts the teacher to view students answers one question at a time. that is, you would score all the question ones, then all the questions twos, etc. This increases accuracy and decreases time on task for grading.
2. Summarize the Content
For the busy teacher who may not have time to develop comprehension questions on video lessons, assigning students to summarize the content or take notes from it is an effective practice. Note taking from video lessons has been found to ” help struggling readers overcome their difficulties when learning from text blogs but not from video blogs.” Further, “Studies with undergraduate students […] demonstrated that students instructed to take notes recalled more information from a video lecture than the control group.” (Hashem Ali Issa Almuslamani, Islam A. Nassar & Omar Rabeea Mahdi)
Innovation can help you with this ion two ways. First, Innovation sets up a handy form next to the video for summarizing. Secondly, and more importantly, the Innovation AI grading assistant is easily trained to help you score the summaries.
3. Proctored Viewing
Another strategy for engaging students in video learning that Innovation can help you accomplish is proctored viewing. This application is very simple: it monitors student screen activity during the playing of a video such that it can increase the chances of active engagement. The proctor notes are then submitted when the video ends.
Proctored viewing is less effective that the Etude or having students summarize the content. Proctored viewing probably works best for videos that are six to nine minutes long. Studies found that “the median engagement time for videos less than 6 minutes long was close to 100%–that is, students tended to watch the whole video. As videos lengthened ,however, student engagement dropped, such that the median engagement time with 9- to 12-minutevideos was ∼50%, and the median engagement time with 12- to 40-minute videos was ∼20%. In fact, the maximum median engagement time for a video of any length was 6 minutes. Making videos longer than 6–9 minutes is therefore likely to be wasted effort” (Brame).
[V]ideos […] have a direct and positive effect on increasing the students’ participation in the classroom.
Hashem Ali Issa Almuslamani, Islam A. Nassar & Omar Rabeea Mahdi
When students have submitted their proctor notes, the teacher can quickly view an easy to read summary of each student’s interaction with the video lesson. From there, teachers can discern the level of engagement to some degree. The proctor notes reveal when the student started or paused the video, for how long, and how much of it ran on the screen.
The proctored video app is useful when students are already likely to be engaged with a short video because of interest or prior knowledge and when there is some followup activity in class using the content. Videos are shown to increase class participation, so proctored video assignments can be useful tools to monitor some aspects of student engagement and support some accountability.
Innovation offers three research-based paths to engagement and accountability in video lessons. The apps were designed by working teachers and tested out by very ambitious teenagers who like to try to find software bugs. Why not give Innovation a try?
Sources
Almuslamani, H., Nassar, I., Mahdi O. (2020, May 12). The Effect of Educational Videos on Increasing Student Classroom Participation: Action Research. College of Administrative Sciences, Applied Science University, Kingdom of Bahrain. Retrieved 24 April 2023, from https://www.sciedu.ca/journal/index.php/ijhe/article/view/17480
Brame, C. J. (October 2017). Effective Educational Videos: Principles and Guidelines for Maximizing Student Learning from Video Content. CBE—Life Sciences Education Vol. 15, No. 4. Retrieved 24 April 2023 from https://www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/cbe.16-03-0125.
Delgado, P., Anmarkrud, &O., Avila, V., Altamura, L., Chireac, S. M., Pérez, A., & Salmerón, L. (2021, November 30). Learning from text and video blogs: Comprehension effects on secondary school students – education and Information Technologies. SpringerLink. Retrieved April 24, 2023, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-021-10819-2