Optimal Video Length for Student Engagement

For those persons using or considering using online video lectures in their courses, as occurs for example in "flipped classroom" or other models of blended learning,  you may be interested in this post (https://www.edx.org/blog/optimal-video-length-student/1239)  in which Philip Guo, an assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester whose main research interests are in human-computer interaction and online education, shares preliminary results about video usage in blended or online courses.  The post is based on findings published in a Wall Street Journal article, An Early Report Card on Massive Open Online Courses, obtained from initial analyses of a few math and science courses on the edX system.  The findings seem to support what is currently recommended as best practice for use of instructional video.

Guo reports that the data suggest "The optimal video length is 6 minutes or shorter -- students watched most of the way through these short videos. In fact, the average engagement time of any video maxes out at 6 minutes, regardless of its length. And engagement times decrease as videos lengthen: For instance, on average students spent around 3 minutes on videos that are longer than 12 minutes, which means that they engaged with less than a quarter of the content. Finally, certificate-earning students engaged more with videos, presumably because they had greater motivation to learn the material."

Guo ends with a "take-home message for instructors" using or thinking about using videos in their classes, as occurs for example in "flipped classroom" approaches or other models of blended learning.  The message is that in order to maximize student engagement, video lectures should be broken up into small, bite-sized pieces.