Long or short video?
The length of an educational video often gets much attention, but it's more complicated than short videos always being best. Here you will find help choosing the length of your video and how to manage a longer video with time stamps and chapter divisions. You also get tips on referring to other videos without confusing your students and making future course development difficult.
How to choose the length of a video?
Different opinions about the best length of a course video exist, with different studies advocating different results. We recommend adjusting the video's length according to the content and how the video will be used. The optimal video length can thus vary between courses and even within courses. If the students are interested, the length of the video is less important. Still, for videos over 20 minutes, the students may choose to watch the videos in several sessions.
Remember to prioritize the educational quality and content of the video before its length. Instead of asking yourself how long your video should be, you should rather ask yourself questions like:
- Do all parts of the video have the same purpose? Aim for the video to have only one purpose, with all parts of the video supporting that purpose.
- Have you added all the necessary information?
- Can you remove part of the video without a student noticing something missing?
Tips
- If you are new to working with videos, it is recommended to start by recording and editing a shorter video as it is more manageable.
- Content that you remove from one video may fit better in another. For example, an anecdote can be distracting in a video introducing a new concept, but the same anecdote is perfect for a video about real-life examples.
Divide the video with timestamps or chapters
Coursebooks are divided into chapters to help the reader find relevant material. A course video should be similarly divided for the same reason. In a video, the chapter divisions also act as a table of contents that helps students overview and navigate the video. It is especially beneficial for long videos but is suitable for most videos longer than a few minutes.
You can create a chapter division using a list of timestamps or insert them into the video progress bar using the chapter function in the video player. KTH Play uses Kaltura's media player, so you can insert chapters into the "Timeline" tab according to the guide Manage Chapters and Slides (knowledge.kaltura.com) .
Be careful when referencing other videos
If you have several videos in your course, you've probably planned the order in which students will watch them, so it's tempting to refer to things like “next video”. However, your students may have chosen a different order than you intended and become confused, even if the videos are recorded in the chronological order of the course. In online teaching, it is especially common for students to navigate relatively freely between different videos. References to other videos may also hinder future development of the course as the original video order may change.
Despite the problems with referencing, it is sometimes a must. Your videos are part of a course plan and therefore depend on each other to some extent. There are several ways to solve this, for example:
- Put all references as text on the page where you embed the video. For example, "video X introduces concepts explained in depth in video Y. Video Z shows applications."
- Refer to the videos by name and only at the beginning or end, so editing is easy if needed.
- Create a longer video and reference only within the video. It works best if it's easy to navigate to the different parts of the video.
Related reading material
Video Length: How Long Should a Course Video Be? (blink.ucsd.edu)