What is it?
Videos can be an effective educational tool to introduce students to your unit of study, difficult concepts or just as a way to connect with your students in the development of your learning community. Regardless of the objective of the video, ensure that students are asked to think about the content through a series of questions or get students to complete a formative quiz at the end of the video.
Why use it?
- Research shows that the use of multimedia in courses promotes student’s engagement (see extra resources).
- Videos can promote active learning if they form part of a coherent learning design with appropriate learning activities and assessment tasks (if relevant).
How do I do it?
- If you are adopting a flipped model, provide the students with the video and ask them to watch it prior to the classroom session.
- It is important to provide learning activities related to the videos – consider providing guiding questions for the students to answer or embed them in the video material. This can be done in Panopto.
Considerations
Consider the following in the design of your video material:
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Cognitive load
– minimise extraneous load and optimise germane load.
- Signals – highlight the key information.
- Segments – chunk the information into smaller pieces.
- Weeds – eliminate extraneous information such as background music.
- Matching modality – use auditory and visual channels to enhance germane load (e.g. narrated animations).
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Non-cognitive elements that impact engagement
- Keep the video short (less than 10 minutes long) as the research suggests that student engagement drops off if the videos are longer than 10 minutes.
- Use a conversational style as opposed to formal language.
- Be enthusiastic and speak relatively quickly.
- Try to match modality.
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Elements that promote active learning
- Use guiding questions for students to answer while watching the video.
- Try to incorporate interactive features that provide control to the students.
- Integrate the questions in the video material.
Resources
Vanderbilt University – effective educational videos
Case-study: Pre-class learning methods for flipped classrooms and team-based learning
