Open online education has become increasingly popular. In Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) videos are generally the most used method of teaching. While most MOOCs are offered in English, the... Show moreOpen online education has become increasingly popular. In Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) videos are generally the most used method of teaching. While most MOOCs are offered in English, the global availability of these courses has attracted many non-native English speakers. To ensure not only the availability, but also the accessibility of open online education, courses should be designed to minimize detrimental effects of a language barrier, for example by providing subtitles. However, with many conflicting research findings it is unclear whether subtitles are beneficial or detrimental for learning from a video, and whether this depends on characteristics of the learner and the video. We hypothesized that the effect of 2nd language subtitles on learning outcomes depends on the language proficiency of the student, as well as the visual-textual information complexity of the video. This three-way interaction was tested in an experimental study. No main effect of subtitles was found, nor any interaction. However, the student’s language proficiency and the complexity of the video do have a substantial impact on learning outcomes. Show less
Sluis, F. van der; Ginn, J.H.; Zee, T. van der 2016
Understanding why and how students interact with educational videos is essential to further improve the quality of MOOCs. In this paper, we look at the complexity of videos to explain two related... Show moreUnderstanding why and how students interact with educational videos is essential to further improve the quality of MOOCs. In this paper, we look at the complexity of videos to explain two related aspects of student behavior: the dwelling time (how much time students spend watching a video) and the dwelling rate (how much of the video they actually see). Building on a strong tradition of psycholinguistics, we formalize a definition for information complexity in videos. Furthermore, building on recent advancements in time-on-task measures we formalize dwelling time and dwelling rate based on click-stream trace data. The resulting computational model of video complexity explains 22.44% of the variance in the dwelling rate for students that finish watching a paragraph of a video. Video complexity and student dwelling show a polynomial relationship, where both low and high complexity increases dwelling. These results indicate why students spend more time watching (and possibly contemplating about) a video. Furthermore, they show that even fairly straightforward proxies of student behavior such as dwelling can already have multiple interpretations; illustrating the challenge of sense-making from learning analytics. Show less
