Videos are one of the most widely used teaching and learning modalities and form the backbone of many online courses. Therefore, understanding what influences video-watching behavior has been an area of intense interest to educators and course designers. Exploration of video engagement in online courses has focused primarily on factors intrinsic to each video, such as video length and production style, with less exploration of the effects of the course context. Furthermore, the prevailing narrative that emphasizes keeping videos relatively short (under six minutes in length) stems from studies looking at engagement during individual viewing sessions for each video, rather than total engagement measured over all of a student’s viewing sessions for a given video. Using detailed viewing data from 3.1M video views in a variety of online biomedical science courses, we demonstrate that students regularly engage with educational videos over multiple viewing sessions. This behavior causes single-viewing metrics to significantly underestimate true engagement, and indicates that the commonly accepted wisdom of limiting videos to only 6 minutes in length is not well-grounded in learners’ actual behavior. We also show that elements of course context are strongly associated with video engagement. Such elements include the number of graded assessments associated with each video, a video’s position within a course, and requiring video viewing in order to obtain desirable outcomes, such as certificates. Based on the data, we create linear models that are able to predict whether a video will garner high or low engagement across single and multiple viewing sessions. These models are significantly more accurate than models that rely on video length alone, further substantiating the importance of course context. These results suggest several factors that educators and course designers can utilize in video design and course development to increase video engagement.

中文翻译：

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有人在观看吗：教育视频参与的多因素激励框架


视频是最广泛使用的教学方式之一，也是许多在线课程的支柱。因此，了解影响视频观看行为的因素一直是教育工作者和课程设计者非常感兴趣的领域。在线课程中视频参与度的探索主要集中在每个视频固有的因素上，例如视频长度和制作风格，而对课程背景影响的探索较少。此外，强调保持视频相对较短（长度低于六分钟）的流行说法源于对每个视频的单独观看会话期间的参与度的研究，而不是对给定视频的学生的所有观看会话中测量的总参与度。使用各种在线生物医学科学课程中 310 万次视频观看的详细观看数据，我们证明学生经常在多次观看会话中观看教育视频。这种行为导致单次观看指标大大低估了真实的参与度，并表明将视频长度限制为 6 分钟的普遍接受的智慧并没有充分依据学习者的实际行为。我们还表明，课程背景元素与视频参与度密切相关。这些元素包括与每个视频相关的分级评估的数量、视频在课程中的位置以及需要观看视频以获得期望的结果（例如证书）。根据这些数据，我们创建了线性模型，能够预测视频在单次和多次观看会话中是否会获得高参与度或低参与度。 这些模型比仅依赖视频长度的模型要准确得多，进一步证实了课程背景的重要性。这些结果表明教育工作者和课程设计者可以在视频设计和课程开发中利用几个因素来提高视频参与度。