By Cindy Nebel

Whether you are a K-12 educator, higher education instructor, or corporate businessperson, you have likely experienced a considerable shift to teaching and learning via video over the past year. During this pandemic, we have all rapidly moved to meeting in online platforms and recording messages for our learners. What impact has this had on learning?

Earlier this year, a review was published examining the effects of learning from video (1). The authors scoured the literature in order to come to some concrete conclusions related to when and how learning from video is beneficial or detrimental to learning.

Pros and Cons of Learning from Video

It’s an interesting theoretical debate. Learning from video has many possible drawbacks. Many of us have experience so-called Zoom fatigue and learning from video often means that the learner does not have the social pressure to stay engaged, does not have peers to interact with, and/or is sitting in an environment that is distracting. Here’s a picture of me in a work meeting earlier this year trying to “learn from video” with my two young children:

But there are also possible advantages to video as a learning medium. Video has the potential to be a very effective use of dual coding, allowing us to use simultaneous auditory and visual processing to better encode the information. Another possible benefit is the ability for a learner to pause or rewind an asynchronous video to process material or take notes. This might serve to reduce cognitive load and thereby improve processing.

In this review study, the authors attempted to consider each of these issues in order to determine the circumstances under which videos might benefit learning. In particular, they looked at the effects of swapping out videos for other content (e.g. live lectures, textbooks, etc.) and the effects of adding videos to existing content.

They had very specific criteria for including studies in this particular review.

1. They did not include synchronous videoconferencing as learning from video because it is qualitatively different than learning from a pre-recorded video, but they did compare pre-recorded videos to live lectures.

2. They only included randomized designs, so that students were randomly assigned to groups to remove other confounds.

3. They only looked at studies that analyzed objective measures of learning instead of student satisfaction. (As with many effective learning strategies, students don’t always enjoy desirable difficulties.)

4. And the authors were only interested in higher education for this review and only looked at studies done in that population.

What did they find?

Overall, swapping out video for other types of content had a positive effect on learning, although it is important to note that this was true for 50% of the 105 total studies that they examined, but in 19% of the studies there was actually a reverse effect and no difference in the rest. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the driving effect here was what the video replaced. When the video replaced static media (e.g. a textbook) there was a much higher positive effect than if the video replaced a teacher lecturing. And the benefit was very large when the video involved some interactivity, such as co-viewing with a peer.

There was also a difference in what was learned. Learning new skills benefitted from video more than learning new knowledge. And adding videos (vs. replacing content with videos) effectively always benefitted learning.

Bottom line

So what does this mean for all of us? Well, for one, our students are unlikely hurting from the switch to learning from video and they might actually be benefitting from it, but some of that depends on how they are using the videos. Students should be encouraged to engage in viewing parties perhaps or at least to use the ability to pause the video to their advantage. Instructors should be cognizant of utilizing the principles of high-quality multi-media creation to reduce cognitive load. And one of the largest effects of this review was that adding videos to existing content benefited learning the most. As we move back to “normal” perhaps one of the biggest takeaways from this review is that our time creating videos for classes was not wasted. We can provide these videos as supplements to our teaching in order to boost student learning.

References:

(1) Noetel, M., Griffith, S., Delaney, O., Sanders, T., Parker, P., del Pozo Cruz, B., & Lonsdale, C. (2021). Video improves learning in higher education: A systematic review. Review of Educational Research, 91(2), 204-236.

(2) Mayer, R. E. (2008). Applying the science of learning: Evidence-based principles for the design of multimedia instruction. American psychologist, 63(8), 760.