In a word, no! (Well, technically you can, but it’s a bad idea.) A well-established guideline related to students’ attention span says that for online lecture clips and screencasts, shorter is better and about six minutes is a good target.

Marketing gurus at Wistia Blog have analyzed 564,710 videos with more than 1.3 billion plays and have found that (as you would expect) the longer the video, the less likely people are to complete it. Very short videos of less than two minutes hold a viewer’s attention best, but videos that short are generally not that useful for covering the amount of content we want to present. You can see the data here.

Okay, I hear you say—that’s well and good for marketing. Surely, I can use longer videos than THAT when I’m teaching college students.

Well, again, let’s look at the evidence. In a 2014 study, some MIT professors studied viewer persistence data from 6.9 million video sessions in four EdX MOOC offerings (Guo, et. al, 2014). They found that video length was “by far the most significant indicator of engagement” as measured by the length of time students watched the video and whether they attempted embedded assessment questions. Median engagement time was six minutes regardless of video length, leading to the authors’ recommendation that videos should be edited into short chunks of less than six minutes in length.

So what should you do in your short videos? The MIT folks have answers for that one, too. It turns out that tutorials in which you do step-by-step problem solving (think Khan Academy) are more effective than PowerPoint slides. (Then again, what isn’t, except for showing pictures, diagrams, and charts with minimal verbiage?) Filming in a more informal setting where you can make eye contact, such as with a laptop webcam in your office, may be more effective than a fancy professional studio production. Finally, it works better to plan these videos specifically for the online format instead of just videotaping a class and hoping for natural stopping points.

The next big question, of course, is how do I get students to watch the videos and truly engage with the material? There are answers aplenty for that question, which we’ll take up in a future blog. In the meantime, whatever you do, make those online videos short!

Guo, P.J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. Proceedings of the first ACM Conference on Learning@Scale. 

References on online and hybrid classes

1. Boettcher, J.V., & Conrad, R.M. (2010). The online teaching survival guide: Simple and practical pedagogical tips. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
2. Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2016). Teaching and learning STEM: A practical guide, Chapter 7. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
3. Felder, R.M., & Brent, R. (2015). To flip or not to flip. Chemical Engineering Education, 4(3), 191-192.
4. Means, B, Toyama, Y., Murphy, R., Bakia, M., and Jones, K. (2010). Evaluation of evidence-based practices in online learning: A meta-analysis and review of online learning studies. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

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