Understanding in-video dropouts and interaction peaks inonline lecture videos

  • Authors:
  • Juho Kim;Philip J. Guo;Daniel T. Seaton;Piotr Mitros;Krzysztof Z. Gajos;Robert C. Miller

  • Affiliations:
  • MIT CSAIL, Cambridge, MA, USA;University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA;MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA;edX, Cambridge, MA, USA;Harvard SEAS, Cambridge, MA, USA;MIT CSAIL, Cambridge, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

With thousands of learners watching the same online lecture videos, analyzing video watching patterns provides a unique opportunity to understand how students learn with videos. This paper reports a large-scale analysis of in-video dropout and peaks in viewership and student activity, using second-by-second user interaction data from 862 videos in four Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on edX. We find higher dropout rates in longer videos, re-watching sessions (vs first-time), and tutorials (vs lectures). Peaks in re-watching sessions and play events indicate points of interest and confusion. Results show that tutorials (vs lectures) and re-watching sessions (vs first-time) lead to more frequent and sharper peaks. In attempting to reason why peaks occur by sampling 80 videos, we observe that 61% of the peaks accompany visual transitions in the video, e.g., a slide view to a classroom view. Based on this observation, we identify five student activity patterns that can explain peaks: starting from the beginning of a new material, returning to missed content, following a tutorial step, replaying a brief segment, and repeating a non-visual explanation. Our analysis has design implications for video authoring, editing, and interface design, providing a richer understanding of video learning on MOOCs.