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.