Asynchronous online (on-demand) video lectures have various advantages for students, but student engagement with this format often fails. Viewing a traditional 50+ minute lecture online is exhausting for students. Many simply stop watching and those that continue will attempt to brute force viewing at x2 speed. Comprehension suffers as much as the motivation to learn. Yet you can circumvent these issues entirely and achieve 100% engagement while also enhancing learning outcomes.

If you’re recording your lectures in your office (or at home) and then uploading them to Echo360, have a look at your viewing analytics. You’ll likely be shocked by what you discover. My Echo360 analytics in what myExperience scores suggested was a popular 3rd year zoology course (Learning & Teaching Agree: 5.5/6) revealed that 57-75% of students watched the first three lectures to the end, while as many as 29% of students watched less than half. By the end of the course, this plummeted to 36-43% watching the last three lectures to the end, while 39-57% didn’t even get half way. 

In general, many students report lack of focus, engagement and comprehension because of the passive viewing format of traditional lectures. This is the case for both in-person (F2F) and online lectures.

My recommendation is to ditch the traditional lecture entirely and replace it with interactive video lectures that allow students to engage with the content in productive and meaningful ways. You can do this in several ways. The first is through a format I’ve called “Lecture Sandwich”, which is essentially breaking up your lecture into short videos that are sandwiched around activities and quizzes. The second is through self-directed “Choose Your Own Adventure” style lectures where students select the order of content they view. This works particularly well for content that requires students to explore alternative answers or consider alternative viewpoints. Both formats provide students with agency in their learning while also helping to reinforce concepts presented. 

These interactive video lectures can be created in a variety of ways, but h5p builds are particularly effective because they allow lectures to be embedded in your learning platform more elegantly (e.g., on your Moodle course page). YouTube offers another option for creating self-direct interactive lectures as well. 

Data from h5p analytics and post-course surveys of students collected over several years highlight just how effective these interactive lectures are over traditional ‘sage-on-the-stage’ lectures (in-person or online). All students (100%) viewed and interacted with the entirety of the lecture content. In post-course surveys, 49% of students indicated they preferred the ‘Lecture Sandwich’ format, 27% the self-directed ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’ format, while only 8% preferred the traditional non-interactive recorded lecture. When asked why they preferred the interactive over traditional lectures, 56% of students indicated they found them more engaging,19% said they improved their focus, and 13% found they increased their comprehension of content.

If you’re not familiar with h5p, I have worked with the EdTech folks in the PVCESE and the Faculty of Science and they now have the skills in developing both types of interactive lectures. Send me an email if you’d like more information on how to create interactive lectures.

Here's a 5 minute video summarising the data on student engagement with interactive lectures over traditional pre-recorded lectures, followed by a blog post on an example 'Choose-Your-Own-Adventure' lecture I give in a 2nd year ecology course: