Post on 13-Apr-2017
Exploring student viewing behaviors in online educational
videos
Alexandros KleftodimosTEI of Western Macedonia &
University of Macedonia
Georgios EvangelidisUniversity of Macedonia
The importance of video use in education is depicted in many
studies and reports• Video Use in Higher Education, designed and funded by
Copyright Clearance Center and conducted by Intelligent Television with the cooperation of New York University, 2009.
• Digitally Inclined & Deepening connections, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) annual surveys conducted by Grunwald Associates, in 2009 and 2010
• R.H. Kay, Exploring the use of video podcasts in education: A comprehensive review of the literature, Computers in Human Behavior, 28(3), May 2012, pp. 820-831
…..and it is evident from University and private organization initiatives
Where video is the main medium for distributing educational material
Research on viewing behaviours
• There is an ongoing expansion of online video use in education and as a consequence research that focuses on how students view educational videos (viewing patterns) becomes of particular interest
• Most of the papers focusing in this research area use surveys and focus groups and only a few adopt a different approach and use streaming server log file analysis and datamining to analyze viewing patterns.
In a previous paper we presented
“A framework for recording, monitoring and analyzing learner behavior while watching
and interacting with online educational videos”
and in this paper we present findings from using this framework in educational settings
and examining the gathered data
Few words about the framework
Login
Web Page with Videos
Videos can be Linear or Interactive and they can contain
•Quiz questions
•Captions,
•Screen capture
•animations, etc
The Database contains
Initial descriptive information
Users,
videos,
video sections,
interactive elements
quiz questions that exist
session information
• Videos watched• Sections from a video watched (sections
are defined on topic basis)• Actions, stop-resume, backward and
forward jumps• Interactive elements attempted• Quiz Questions answered
Two modules have been developed in order to aid the educator in monitoring individual learner
activity
– A module that provides a way to navigate through the database entries
– A module that provides graphs picturing the sequence of viewed videos, sections and interactive items (or quiz questions) attempted
users
Videos viewed in a session
Sections viewed in a video
Sections viewed by a learner
Sections viewed by a learner
The Educational Settings
Video lessons were created for supporting the courses
“Introduction to Computers” (1st semester),
“Communication Technologies” (6th semester)
Dpt of Digital Media and Communication at the Technological Institute of Western Macedonia
Two web pages were created for accommodating the educational videos
Web Page of Course Communication Technologies
Educational settingsIntroduction to computers (for learning Microsoft Office
Word and Excel concepts)• 25 linear demonstration videos • 20 interactive videos • 2 videos consisting mostly of quizzes• fall semester of 2012-13
Communication Technologies (learning web page design with Dreamweaver)
• 28 linear demonstration videos, • 14 interactive videos • 28 document files. • spring semester of 2012-13.
Educational Settings
• Videos were used for supporting the laboratory part of the course
• Concepts covered in videos were also taught in class as well
• Laboratory classes had obligatory attendance• Questionnaires were also handed out (questions
addressed issues concerning the quality and the ease of use of the video lessons )
FINDINGS
Questionnaires and logged data
• the majority of students stated that they found the quality of videos very good and certainly a better way of learning when compared to printed handouts (this was later confirmed by examining the data).
Text hand outs
Disincordance regarding a simple question
• the number of students stating that they used the video lessons is in discordance with the numbers retrieved from the database .
• 66 students from course “IC1” said they accessed the videos while 44 actually did.
• Can we rely solely on questionnaires when examining viewing behaviors?
Viewing videos – When and where
• Around 50% of the viewings for “CT6” and 60% for “IC1” took place only in a 7 days period preceding the exam
• A smaller but considerable amount of viewings is also observed in periods when an assignment was in progress
A peak in viewings before exams
Viewing week days-Viewing Hours
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
1600
1800
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday
Students viewed videos mainly in afternoon, evening and night hours with the peak being between 16 and 17 o clock
Viewings took place from places outside campus
• More than 90% of the viewings were accessed from places outside the campus, despite the fact that students were encouraged to use the computers in the library for viewing the videos and for practising on the software packages at the same time
Students preferred videos to text handouts
• Learner visits to the text versions of the exercise were also logged for “CT6” (concepts in the text were described with sufficient detail using also images).
• 146 out of 231 students visited the webpage• 475 visits to text files • 6043 video viewings (5331 concerning linear
videos)• Students did indeed prefer video lessons to text
handouts
Video viewings and Performance
Results of Independent Samples T-test
Medium Watched/Did not watch
Mean T- Statistic
Grade Did not watch (85 students)
5.68 t=-3.815*
Watched at least one video(146 students)
7.04
*Significant at 0.01 level
Viewing patterns
Viewing styles
De Boer, Kommers & de Brock [7] noted distinct styles of viewing behaviour:
(a) linear (watching a complete video once) (b) elaborative (watching a complete video
twice)(c) maintenance rehearsal (watching part of
a video repeatedly)(d) zapping (skipping through video and
watching brief segments).
Moran et al. [8] dealt with listening profiles from students that listened educational audios.
• (a) straight-through (listening to an audio file sequentially),
• (b) stop-start (performing a number of pauses and resumes, from the same point, at a number of points in the audio track),
• (c) re-listen (stopping and going back at specific points to re-listen portions of the audio),
• (d) skip ahead (pausing and moving forward, skipping portions of the audio),
• (e) non sequential (going back and forth and listening to portions of the audio).
Traces of these styles are also found in our data
They were found from observing the video and section sequence graphs
A combination of elaborative (watching a complete video twice) and
re-listen (stopping and going back at specific points to re-listen portions of the audio),
Viewings from “CT6” classified by actions
Viewings containing only N Percentage1 sequential viewings 3281 61.55%
2 sequential viewings - drop off 637 11.95%3 backward jumps 333 6.25%4 backward jumps + pause-resume actions 292 5.48%5 pause-resume actions 250 4.69%6 forward jumps 182 3.41%7 backward jumps + forward jumps 153 2.87%8 backward + forward jumps + pause resume
actions142 2.66%
9 forward jumps + pause-resume actions 61 1.14%
5331
Key findings (a) logging and analysing viewing activity is very important
if we want to examine viewing behaviours; relying exclusively on interviews and questionnaires for this type of research cannot give us accurate answers about learner engagement, video popularity, and the viewing patterns followed by learners,
(b) students viewed educational videos mostly to prepare for exams and to complete a given assignment,
(c) there is evidence that viewing videos affected the students performance,
(d) viewing patterns recorded by other researchers exist in our setting as well; the sequential viewing is as expected the dominant pattern and the re-watch pattern (i.e., re-watching segments) follows