Seeing the Instructor in Two Video Styles: Preferences and Patterns

Instructional content designers of online learning platforms are concerned about optimal video design guidelines that ensure course effectiveness, while keeping video production time and costs at reasonable levels. In order to address the concern, we use clickstream data from one Coursera course to analyze the engagement, motivational and navigational patterns of learners upon being presented with lecture videos incorporating the instructor video in two styles first, where the instructor seamlessly interacts with the content and second, where the instructor appears in a window in a portion of the presentation window. Our main empirical finding is that the video style where the instructor seamlessly interacts with the content is by far the most preferred choice of the learners in general and certificate-earners and auditors in particular. Moreover, learners who chose this video style, on average, watched a larger proportion of the lectures, engaged with the lectures for a longer duration and preferred to view the lectures in streamed mode (as opposed to downloading them), when compared to their colleagues who chose the other video style. We posit that the important difference between the two video modes was the integrated view of a ‘real’ instructor in close proximity to the content, that increased learner motivation, which in turn affected the watching times and the proportion of lectures watched. The results lend further credibility to the previously suggested hypothesis that positive affect arising out of improved social cues of the instructor influences learner motivation leading to their increased engagement with the course and its broader applicability to learning at scale scenarios.