Teaching and Learning blog

Video is everywhere. With more than a billion hours of video footage viewed on YouTube every day,¹ it is a medium that most students are both familiar and comfortable with. The question is not whether to use videos in higher education, but how to use them to improve learner outcomes.There is plenty of research that touches on the role of video in learning, and there are even some studies that specifically examine the different ways of using video in university or college courses.

After reviewing and analyzing this research, we’re confident that most higher education courses could improve learner outcomes by supplementing instruction and other learning content with relevant educational videos.

Here are three reasons why.

1. Students want to learn from videos

Video is part of higher education even when it’s not officially part of the learning experience. Some higher education students prefer videos to written sources and many will seek out subject-related videos on YouTube, even when they’re not assigned.

In a survey of hundreds of business students:

• 71% said they used YouTube as part of their academic learning
• 70.5% believed they could learn a lot about a subject by watching related videos instead of reading a book²

In a 2020 study, a group of higher education students was given 30 minutes of online research time to learn enough about a topic to write a brief summary. On average, the students spent 8.5 of their 30 minutes watching videos. Only 15.7% of the students watched no videos at all.³

Studies also seem to show that the appeal of video is not limited to particular subjects or learning preferences.⁴ Whatever the course, and whatever the makeup of the student body, including videos can engage students in learning.

2. Supplemental videos improve learning

Videos clearly appeal to students, but do they actually help them learn? When combined with other learning methods, there is evidence that they can.

A 2021 study looked at different ways of using videos in higher education courses. The researchers found that pivoting the course to video — dropping existing teaching methods and having students watch videos instead — did improve learning somewhat.

But the biggest improvements came when video was added to the existing course content, rather than replacing it.⁵

This may be because adding video gives students more ways to understand the content. If the learning didn’t take hold from a lecture or a written text, maybe it would from a video. Whereas when video replaced other methods, if a student didn’t grasp the content from the video, they had no alternative ways in.

3. Videos can directly affect learning

Does including videos improve learning by making the course more engaging, or do the videos themselves help improve learning? Understanding this helps determine the best types of video to include in higher education courses.

A 2014 study experimented with integrating different types of videos into lectures. When the videos were mainly entertaining, students’ motivation and engagement improved. Higher motivation and engagement are associated with better learning outcomes.

But when the videos were mainly educational and directly relevant to the lecture topic, students performed better on post-lecture quizzes than those who attended a lecture without videos.⁶

This shows that while videos can affect learning by engaging students, they can also have a direct effect on students’ knowledge.

Improving learning for students at all experience levels

To summarize, based on a range of studies:

• higher education courses should include videos
• videos should supplement, not replace, existing course content and instruction
  
• videos should be educational in nature and directly relevant to the subject

When videos are integrated into higher education courses in this way, students — whatever their previous academic history — are more likely to outperform their predicted grades.⁷

Once, students looking to supplement their knowledge of a topic had to rely on the limited selection of books in their college library. Today, college students have nearly unlimited information at their fingertips. But does more information always equal better learning?

A number of recent research studies suggest that in fact, providing students with a more limited set of high-quality resources chosen specifically for the course can lead to better outcomes than when students supplement their knowledge using the internet. Importantly, it may also help to level out inequities in the learning environment.

It’s true that there is a large amount of high quality information available online, on nearly every topic imaginable. It’s also true that searching, assessing, filtering, and making use of online resources are valuable 21st-century skills. So it’s understandable when higher education courses call for students to look online for sources to cite, or to supplement their knowledge of the course subject.

But that’s just the thing: finding information online and judging its reliability are skills in themselves. This complicates learning, because:

• not all students in the course will have those skills to the same degree
• they’re not usually the skills the course is teaching (or assessing)

Reliable, or just familiar?

As you may expect from a group of people who have largely grown up with the internet, higher education students know that not everything they find online is reliable. They do think about the origins of the information they find, and judge whether they are credible.

However, students don’t always know how to make these kinds of judgments accurately.

In one 2020 study, higher education students were provided with several items from different sources and prompted to write about the items’ perspectives. More than 2 in 5 of the students (41%) assumed that certain items were credible because they recognized the source.¹ They thought they were judging the reliability of the information, but were really rating the familiarity of the sources.

Another study, also published in 2020, asked economics students to use a search engine to investigate the truth of several claims. Again, these students ended up relying heavily on sites they were familiar with, rather than truly valid or reliable sources. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of their most cited sources was Wikipedia.²

Of course, not all students make the same mistakes. For example, a 2017 study found that students who score higher for reading comprehension are also more likely to find relevant, valid results when using search engines.³ Students with previous experience of searching for academic sources may also be more accurate judges of the information they find.

But this presents another challenge to learning. It means that in courses that ask students to supplement their subject knowledge by searching the internet, those with lower reading comprehension and less academic experience are at an unfair disadvantage.

Best use of effort

Even with sophisticated search engines, sifting the vast quantities of information on the internet for relevant sources takes time and effort. So does assessing the reliability of each source.

These activities also add to students’ cognitive load: the amount of brainpower needed to complete a task.

Students’ time, effort, and cognitive load are all finite resources. What they expend on finding and assessing sources, they aren’t using to actually increase their knowledge.

All of this means that providing students with a hand-picked suite of high quality resources, chosen specifically for the course, is better for learning than leaving them to find their own online.

Providing learning resources as part of the course levels the playing field. Students with different levels of reading comprehension and academic experience will all have equally valid, reliable materials to learn from.

And because students tend to trust material provided as part of the course, they won’t use up time, effort, or cognitive load gauging whether the material is reliable.

All in one

This isn’t a call to send students back to the college library. Even if the world wide web isn’t the best environment for learning, there are still clear benefits to digital learning.

In fact, digital platforms allow us to free up even more of students’ cognitive load for learning: by providing suites of reliable resources under the same roof as learning and assessment.

_____________________________________

This is the thinking behind Pearson+. No switching, searching, or wondering where to look. Everything needed for the course, all in one place – leading to better, more equitable outcomes for all.

Sources

¹ Banerjee, Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, & Roeper, 2020

² Nagel et al., 2020

³ Hahnel et al., 2017