What good is video in online teaching? (And what is Khan Academy doing right?)

Video lectures, we believed, those of us who've been working in distance learning for two decades or more, were bad and ineffective. The public might assume that university distance education meant putting lectures on TV or radio, or onto online video – an assumption reflected in the Open University’s original 1963 conception as ‘the University of the Air’ – but we thought we knew better. There was an old joke, we remembered, about a university lecture being a technology for transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either. We were determined not to fall into this trap, focusing our efforts instead on developing "active learning" approaches to avoid students falling into the role of passive recipients. Yet over the past few years the online video lectures of the Khan Academy have become both super-popular and super-successful, and the world of MOOCs is dominated by video lectures. What's going on? And have we been wrong all along?

The reflection in this post has been prompted by three things: first an article 'Video and online learning' by six academics from the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and the MIT Media Laboratory and a blog post by Tony Bates discussing it; second an interview with Salman Khan, broadcast last year in the radio series The Educators, and still available online; and third a conference paper 'Learning is not a Spectator Sport' by academics from Carnegie Mellon University reporting an experimental study of MOOC learning.

The von Humboldt / MIT paper is based on a survey of 20 courses from 6 major MOOC platforms (Coursera, edX, Udacity, iversity, FutureLearn, and Khan Academy) and finds that “video is the main method of content delivery in nearly all MOOCs.” This seems to have been an unthinking decision by the MOOC makers, rather than a principled choice amongst alternatives: “little consideration has been given to the pedagogical affordances of video, what constitutes an effective learning video, and what learning situations the medium of video is best suited for.” What this suggests to me is that MOOC development has been steered not by people with a background in distance education, but by people with a background in technology – including the paper’s authors themselves: as Tony Bates comments, if their literature review concludes “that the use of video as an instructional tool for online learning is a notably underexplored field”, then they just haven’t looked in the right places because “what they are recommending has been known for a long time”.

So the rush to video in MOOCs doesn’t mean that those of us who have come to online learning out of the distance education tradition are wrong: MOOC designers are simply unaware of that tradition and are having to reinvent the wheel. The third paper is an example of wheel reinvention: researchers looked students taking a MOOC on introductory psychology and found that those who opted to do additional learning activities and comprehension checks did better in the final exam. Thus they re-discovered and re-justified the pedagogy of “learning by doing”, a century after Dewey.

But two elements of the von Humboldt / MIT paper are really useful. One is a typology and technical analysis of video production styles, or ways of organising the visual field of a lecture video, each of which has subtly different affordances for learning. Their 36 types, all illustrated and discussed, are: talking head, presentation slides with voice-over, picture-in-picture, text-overlay, Khan-style tablet capture, Udacity-style tablet capture, actual paper or whiteboard, screencast, animation, classroom lecture, recorded seminar, interview, conversation, live video, webcam capture, demonstration, on location, and green screen. This is a useful menu of choices for video producers to use while planning video making with academics. Even more useful is a typology of the pedagogic uses to which video can be put. Their twelve types are:

• Building rapport – establishing an emotional connection
• Virtual field trips – access to people and places
• Manipulating time and space – macro / micro views and slow motion
• Telling stories – captivating viewers and taking them on a journey
• Motivating learners – stimulating appetite by conveying enthusiasm
• Historical footage – bringing the past to life
• Demonstrations – showing experiments and psychomotor skills
• Visual juxtaposition – creating meaning through contrasting concepts
• Multimedia presentation – combining audio-visual elements

This can be used by learning designers as a prompt list, or just a stimulus to thought, when they are trying to establish with academics why there should be video at all: what pedagogical benefit is so great as to justify the still significant expense. (Notice that ”Communicating information” is not one of them.)

So where do Khan Academy videos fit into this typology? What are they – to judge by their massive popularity – getting right? They certainly have their own production style, sufficiently distinctive to warrant its own category in the von Humboldt / MIT paper, but I believe they are successful not because this production style is somehow superior to all others but because it’s perfectly suited to the subject area with which the Khan Academy originated and the pedagogical approach which it adopted. Though it has now broadened its range of subjects, the Khan Academy’s original focus was on maths and mathematical physics, and its prototypical videos took the form of Salman Khan going through a mathematical problem or exercise. He was never seen himself; what the screen showed was his mathematical working, line by line, handwritten on a tablet, as he explained what he was doing to solve the problem and why. Now what this reproduces is not a lecture but a tutorial, and one of a kind which will be familiar to anyone who’s received a tutorial in maths or physics: the tutor sits in front of a sheet of paper, you sit beside them, with possibly another student on the other side (if there are more than two students in the tutorial it gets complicated), and you watch their working as they go through problems and proofs, sometimes asking you what should be done next, or asking you to complete the next step. The classic way of learning these subjects is through problems and exercises, and what the tutor does is not so much impart information, although they may do that, as model the process of thinking and helping you to reproduce it until you can do it for yourself unaided. This is what the Khan Academy videos reproduce, both in their pedagogy and in the production style which focusses attention not on the tutor but on the maths.

Sarah Montague (interviewing): It's almost as if somebody's sitting beside you...

Salman Khan: Yeah, … you don't see the face, you just see the writing on this kind of digital blackboard, and you hear the voice. And so, it's, I've had some people say it feels like I'm next to them at the kitchen table, some people say it feels like I'm in their head! (Laughs) And actually some people have even said when they do math problems their internal voice is me, which is weird, but I guess cool!

(Khan’s interview for The Educators, from 2’55”)

If this is how people experience Khan Academy videos, it shows how effective they are at enabling students to internalise their teacher – which is one of the most important ways in which learning occurs. Even though video has no general and universal utility in online teaching, and can actually be distracting and time-wasting as well as expensive, the Khan Academy is a reminder of how effective video can be – provided that its content and production style are aligned to subject matter and pedagogy.

Postscript: another important use of video is as part of a "flipped classroom" approach, helpfully described by three lecturers from the University of Essex in 'Will video kill the lecturing star?' on The Guardian's Higher Education Network.

Cuttings: October 2015

[Hindu] Practice: Darshan and Namaste - 'Daily Meditation' by Richard Rohr. "In the Hindu tradition, darshan (or darsana) is to behold the Divine and to allow yourself to be fully seen. Many Hindus visit temples not to see God, but to let God gaze upon them--and then to join God's seeing which is always unconditional acceptance and compassion."

How the magic of cinema unlocked one man’s coma-bound world - article in MindHacks blog. "Lorina Naci has used cinema to show just how sophisticated conscious awareness can be in a ‘minimally conscious’ patient. The trick they used involved an 8 minute edit of 'Bang! You’re dead', a 1961 episode of 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents'. In the film, a young boy with a toy gun obsession wanders around aiming and firing at people. Unbeknownst to him, and the adults he aims at, on this day he has found a real gun and it has a live bullet in the chamber.... Naci showed the film to healthy participants. To a separate group she showed a scrambled version involving rearranged one-second segments. This ‘control’ version was important because it contained many of the same features as the original; the same visual patterns, the same objects, the same actions. But it lacked the crucial narrative coherence – the knowledge of the bullet – which generated the suspense.... Next the researchers showed the film to two patients in wakeful comas. In one, ... who had been hospitalised and non-responsive for 16 years, his brain response matched those of the healthy controls who’d seen the film. Like them, activity across the cortex rose and fell with the action of the film, indicating an inner consciousness rich enough to follow the plot."

The latest episode in the ‘Can women have it all?’ soap opera" - review of Anne-Marie Slaughter's Unfinished Business by Helen Lewis in The Guardian. "The book practises what it preaches by having rather a lot to say to anyone with a Y chromosome. Slaughter pinpoints something called 'Halo dad syndrome', where fathers are praised for the slightest achievement, such as remembering to pick the kids up from school. This is patronising, she points out, and reaffirms the existing cultural belief that men are not 'naturally' suited to childcare. In one of the best passages of the book, Slaughter flips such compliments around: 'Imagine that as a woman you’re praised for writing a good report at work, a completely routine action for a man, and praised in a way that makes clear that the person who is complimenting you didn’t actually expect you could do it so well.' ”

Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical - article by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. "Thomas More's Utopia, a book that will be 500 years old next year, is astonishingly radical stuff. Not many lord chancellors of England have denounced private property, advocated a form of communism and described the current social order as a 'conspiracy of the rich'. Such men, the book announces, are 'greedy, unscrupulous and useless'. ... Alternative universes are really devices for embarrassing the present, as imaginary cultures are used to estrange and unsettle our own. As such, they have been largely the product of the left. The finest of all such works in Britain is the Marxist William Morris’s, one of the very few utopian visions to offer a detailed account of how the political transformation actually came about.... The word 'utopia' means 'nowhere', but it isn’t clear whether this is because the place could exist but happens not to, or whether it is nowhere in much the same sense that a humble Richard Dawkins or a coy Chris Evans is."

Intellectual snobs beware - review of Dominic Sandbrook's The Great British Dream Factory by Matthew Sweet in The Guardian. " 'Whether British culture is the world’s best is an unanswerable and ultimately pointless question,' [Sandbrook] writes, at the beginning of his latest doorstopper. 'But it has a very good claim, pound for pound, to be its most successful.' He has the numbers to prove it: £30m in the bank account of Oxford University after it invested in the software that powered Grand Theft Auto; 400m Harry Potter books, 1bn Beatles albums and 2bn Agatha Christie novels sold. The triumph of Downton Abbey in China, Top Gear in Iran and Doctor Who everywhere. (The Doctor, pleasingly, is never far from Sandbrook’s thoughts.) These are the figures that make us, Sandbrook argues, 'a cultural superpower'. "

‘I was passionate about Austen's anonymity’ - article by Elena Ferrrante in The Guardian. " Elinor’s 'sense' [in Sense and Sensibility] is, in short, the art of living in the world with equilibrium, satisfying her own desires without hurting other women but, rather, offering herself as a support for their fragility.... It seems to me that Austen, by not putting her name on the books she published, did the same thing as Elinor, and in an extremely radical way. She uses neither her own name nor one that she has chosen. Her stories are not reducible to her; rather, they are written from within a tradition that encompasses her and at the same time allows her to express herself. In this sense they are indeed written by a lady, the lady who does not fully coincide with everyday life but peeks out during the often brief time when, in a common room, a space not hers, Austen can write without being disturbed: a lady who disappears whenever something – the disorderly world of the everyday – interrupts her, forcing her to hide the pages. This lady doesn’t have Jane’s anxieties or her reserve. The lady-narrator describes the ferocity of the male world that clusters around income, is afraid of change, lives idly, contends with futility, sees work as degrading. And above all she rests a clear gaze on the condition of women, on the battle between women to win men and money. But she doesn’t have Jane’s natural resentments toward daily life."

In Online Courses, Students Learn More by Doing Than by Watching - article by Ellen Wexler in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  "When students enroll in MOOCs, they almost always watch a series of video lectures. But just watching videos — without also engaging interactively — is an ineffective way to learn, according to a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.... All of the students [on an Introduction to Psychology MOOC] were assigned 11 weekly quizzes and a final examination. Those in the MOOC-only course scored an average of 57 percent on the final. Those in the combined course scored an average of 66 percent. And when students in the combined course completed an interactive activity, they learned six times as much as those who only read the material or watched a video. 'When one is watching a lecture or reading material, there’s an illusion of learning,' says Ken Koedinger, a professor of human-computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, and an author of a report on the study. 'Lessons communicated in a lecture don’t stick.' "

Catching Violence at the Beginning - 'Daily Meditation' by Richard Rohr. "One of the reasons I founded the Center for Action and Contemplation twenty-eight years ago was to give activists some grounding in spirituality so they could continue working for social change, but from a stance much different than anger, ideology, or willpower pressing against opposing willpower. Many activists I knew loved Gandhi's and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s teachings on nonviolence. But it became clear to me that theirs was often an intellectual appreciation rather than a participation in the much deeper mystery. I saw people on the left playing the victim and creating victims – exactly what Jesus did not do. It was much more subtle than the same game on the right, but it still proceeded from an unkind and self-righteous heart."

Extremely rare Wicked Bible goes on sale - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "To commit adultery, or not to commit adultery – for hundreds of readers in the 17th century, the answer depended on which bible they consulted, after an unfortunate error in a certain edition of the text omitted to include a vital “not”. Known as the 'Wicked' Bible, the text, printed in 1631, leaves the word 'not' from the seventh commandment. This means that amid exhortations that 'thou shalt not kill', and 'thou shalt not steale', readers are also informed that 'thou shalt commit adultery'. One thousand copies of the text, which also came to be known as the Adulterous or Sinners’ Bible, were printed, with the printing error only discovered a year later."

From cold war spy to angry old man: the politics of John le Carré - article by Adam Sisman in The Guardian, based on his John le Carré: The Biography. "One reason why The Spy Who Came in from the Cold made such an enormous impact was its seeming authenticity. This, apparently, was the real world of spying: one in which there were no heroes, and the line between right and wrong was at best blurred. The protagonist, Alec Leamas, is not a glamorous figure: he is a tired, middle-aged man on the edge of burnout. ... The moral ambiguities of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold are in marked contrast to the unquestioning certainties of the James Bond books. To readers in the early 1960s, accustomed to the messy compromises of the cold war, they seemed far more truthful. Similarly, le Carré’s squalid settings seemed more realistic than the five-star hotels and high-rolling casinos frequented by Bond."

Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea: a rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin - article by David Mitchell in The Guardian, based on his introduction to A Wizard of Earthsea. "If Earthsea is one of literature’s best-written fantasy worlds, it is also one of the most cerebral. Chief among its concerns are morality, identity and power.... From Beowulf to Tolkien, to countless formulaic fantasy movies at a multiplex near you, the genre generates two-dimensional Manichaean struggles between Good and Evil, in which morality’s shades of grey are reduced to one black and one white. The real world, as most of us know (if not all presidents and prime ministers), is rarely so monochromatic, and neither is Earthsea. Ged’s quest is not to take down a Lord of Darkness but to learn the nature of the shadow that his vanity, anger and hatred set loose – to master it, by learning its nature and its name.... The climax of A Wizard of Earthsea is not the magical shootout that lesser novels would have ended with, but the high-risk enactment of a process Jung called 'individuation', in which the warring parts of the psyche integrate into a wiser, stronger whole. To quote Le Guin ...: 'In serious fantasy, the real battle is moral or internal … To do good, heroes must know or learn that the "axis of evil" is within them.' "

What does ‘radical’ actually mean? Well, it depends who you ask … - article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. " Can we draw any helpful lessons from [the] confusing tangle of uses [of the word 'radical']? It would be good to know when 'radical' means something nice and when it means something nasty. Should I take a radical attitude to obeying laws I find preposterous? Should you advertise yourself as a baker of radical cronuts? In the end, the political valency of 'radical' simply depends on the power relations between groups. Labour is circumspect about calling itself radical because it doesn’t want to frighten the horses. But the Tories can call themselves radical because they are in office for the next five years and can do whatever they like, which apparently includes cutting working tax credits after promising not to during the election campaign. Now that’s a radical approach to governing with the public’s consent."

How to make a wildlife epic - article by Vincent Graff in Radio Times, 31 Oct to 6 Nov 2015, pp. 8-13. "The narrator for this series is David Attenborough, whose famous authoritative, whispery tones are central to its appeal... 'A good narration is sparse,' he says, 'Don't use any unnecessary words, The visual is always more powerful than the words - so you should only add information that is necessary to fully understand the pictures. You shouldn't repeat what the pictures say.' The narrator must resist the temptation to be too clever, he adds. 'Although all sorts of poetic similes may come into your mind, similes are there for the printed word, in order for you to invoke a picture. If you've already got a picture, there's no point in a simile.' ... However, says Attenborough, 'rhythm is important. You have to tailor the words so that they hit the right picture – the right close-up, the right cut, whatever it is. Pauses are rather more important than the words.'"