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