Incorporating interactivity into longer videos to help with viewer retention.
This semester, I’ve started posting my pre-lab lectures as pre-recorded videos in order to allow me to spend my virtual lab-time showing my students actual slides and pointing out things of interest.
One of the things I noticed was that my audience’s attention as measured by YouTube’s analytics dropped significantly after the first couple of minutes.
Here is an example of the statistics for one of my pre-labs. It’s not even the worst one.
This isn’t surprising. There is plenty of research showing that you have about 3-5min to get your message across in a typical presentation/video. After that you really have to work to keep your audience engaged. Unfortunately, my videos – at ~30-40min each – are about as short as I can make them.
So I’ve been looking for ways to keep my students engaged. Breaking up my videos into shorter segments has occurred to me, but one attempt simply resulted in two long videos instead of one (and I don’t have the time to keep re-recording and re-editing until I get them down to 5min each).
My subject matter isn’t easy to dish out in easily digestible “chunks”, so I need a different strategy.
As I scanned through my videos, I noticed that a few of my videos did not fit the pattern shown above, they are actually maintaining very high retention (and they’re by no means exciting). These just happen to be among the videos I’ve been using for my homework assignments, which take the form of interactive videos.
Providing interactivity seems to result in higher retention. The spikes to 100% occur near time points where I inserted questions into the homework assignment.
So, I decided to convert one of the pre-lab videos for an upcoming lab into an interactive format and posted that to two of my lab sections. I posted the regular YouTube video to the section that will be attending the lab tomorrow (I don’t want to be messing with their resources so close to the lab).
In the interactive video, I chose to insert questions relatively frequently (every ~2-3min) for the initial part of the introduction of the video (mostly slides with text, so not too visually stimulating), and spaced out the questions in the remaining part of the video – partially because I didn’t want to break up the flow of the lecture and distract away from it.
So, here’s my first attempt at converting a long video into something a bit more interactive.
The original video can be found here: https://youtu.be/osedGTR2aAA
I’m not sure that I will see too much of an impact – I certainly don’t expect the sort of numbers I get with the homework videos.
- the homework videos are much shorter than the lecture
- completing the homework assignments earns my students some grades – watching the pre-labs doesn’t
So, these are just a couple of reasons why this experiment could fail, but I do hope for at least some improvement in student engagement and retention. Let’s see how it goes…
