Effective Educational Videos: Principles and Guidelines for Mazimizing Student Learning from Video Content
Consideration of three elements for video design and implementation can help instructors maximize video's utility in the biology classroom: Cognitive Load, Student Engagement, and Active Learning.
Cognitive Load
Student Engagement
Active Learning
Suggests that any learning experience has three componets.
The first of these is intrinsic load, which is inherent to the subject under study and is determined in part by the degrees of connectivity within the subject.
The second component of any learning experience is germane load, which is the level of cognitive activity necessary to reach the desired learning outcome.
The third component of a learning experience is extraneous load, which is a cognitive effort that does not help the
learner toward the desired learning outcome. It is often characterized as the load that arises from a poorly designed lesson but may also be a load
that arises due to stereotype threat or imposter syndrome.
The idea is simple: if students do not watch videos, they cannot learn from them.
The first and most important guideline for maximizing student attention to educational video is to keep it short.
Another method to keep students engaged is to 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,
Important for video narrators to speak relatively quickly and
with enthusiasm.
One of the benefits for instructors in using educational videos can be the ability to reuse them for other classes and other semesters.
Incorporating prompts for students to engage in the type of cognitive activity necessary to process information, can help them build and test mental models, explicitly converting video watching from a passive to an active-learning event.
Package Video with Interactive Questions
Use Interactive Features That Give Students Control
Use Guiding Questions
Make Video Part of a Larger Homework Assignment
They may help to optimize cognitive load by
decreasing extraneous load and increasing germane load.
Interpolated questions may produce some of their benefit by tapping into the "testing effect", in which recall of important information strengthens students’ memory of and ability to use the recalled information.
Interpolated questions may help students engage in more accurate self-assessment, an important benefit for a medium that students may perceive as “easier” than text.
Demostrated better achievement of learning outcomes and greater satisfaction.
Also can demostrate the organization, increasing the germane load of the lesson.
May serve as an implicit means to share 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.
The videos improved students' understanding of difficult concepts when compared with a semester when the videos were not used in conjunction with the homework.
Some recommendations are:
Keep videos brief and targeted on learning goals.
Use audio and visual elements to convey appropriate parts of an explanation; consider how to make these elements complementary rather than redundant.
Use signaling to highlight important ideas or concepts.
Use a conversational, enthusiastic style to enhance engagement.
Embed videos in the context of active learning by using guiding questions, interactive elements, or associated homework assignment.