Video Length

Short All Things Teaching Video on what research shows to be the best length for educational videos.

Video Transcript

So how long should videos be? There isn't a very straightforward answer for this because each learner, it's different. So levels of motivation and their emotional state and even personalities and ages are going to result in different learner preferences for video length. But some research out there suggests that shorter is better with six minutes or less being optimal. One well-known study looked at videos from a Massive Open Online Course or MOOC. And it concluded that it's best to keep videos under or at six minutes. That's because the rate in which learners have dropped off watching really started to increase after that, another study by research and Saudi Arabia looked at interactive videos of different lengths. And it found that the shorter interactive videos under six minutes lead to better retention, both short and long-term. Also remember that longer videos are harder to review. So if the video is packed full of details that won't be remembered, you may want to chunk them out into smaller videos and create a playlist in MediaSpace or another type of video series. And that way the learners can jump around to the specific sections that they need to review. Another option with a longer video, create some sort of takeaway that they can look back at and review from. So an interactive PDF that they can fill out as they listen to and watch the video would be one way to accomplish this. Finally, here's a pro tip. Figure out how many words per minute you generally speak. For me. It's about a 180 and that's one good sized paragraph like this. But I speak a little bit faster than average. But based on knowing my rate of speech, I can look at my rough script for this video and predict more or less how many minutes going to be. In the case of this video, I predicted that the video would be a little bit under two minutes.