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If you are investing time in creating instructional videos for your students or patrons, take a look at a recent article in C&RL News, Brevity, Complexity, Availability: Extrapolating Patron Pref
If you are investing time in creating instructional videos for your students or patrons, take a look at a recent article in C&RL News, Brevity, Complexity, Availability: Extrapolating Patron Preferences from Video Analytics by Sarah Hartman-Caverly, Delaware County Community College.
This article is brief but packed with sound advice for creating video tutorials. Competition for student/patron attention online is an uphill battle, but Hartman-Caverly discovered a few helpful guidelines when digging into their video analytics.
Video tutorials should be:
- Created in segments less than six minutes in length. And ideally, they should be limited to no more than three minutes.
- Front-loaded with the most important content at the beginning.
- Summarized with learning objectives and generic branding at the end.
Hartman-Caverly’s video tutorial cohort learned that their analytics showed students did not watch the videos from beginning to end with average view duration of two minutes and twenty-eight seconds. For lengthier hour-long workshops the average view duration was only three minutes and twenty seconds. Thus, it is important to front-load the essential content and keep it concise.
Another important discovery the group made from the analytics was regarding a video’s complexity of content. They found that when a video was used to demonstrate a more complex concept or action that students not only watched the video in its entirety but also replayed portions to master the skill. Therefore, be sure the content is worth their time to watch – over and over, if necessary.
Hartman-Caverly believes video tutorials increase access to library instruction and provide assistance to students at times when a librarian or classroom faculty is unavailable.
To learn more, take a look at the complete article on C&RL News.