Byte-Sized Learning: A Review of Video Tutorial Engagement in a Digital Media Skills Course

INTRODUCTIONMany educators have turned to video tutorials to help students learn material. The technology allows for distance learning, which has become more prevalent with the emergence of "Massive Online Open Courses," or MOOCs (Guo, Kim, & Rubin, 2014). Video tutorials also support moving some instruction outside of the classroom to free up time for more discussion and problem-solving in class. Bishop and Verleger (2013) define a flipped classroom as any combination of interactive activities in the classroom with "computer-based individual instruction" at home. These "flipped classrooms" have become more prevalent in undergraduate institutions in the last decade.The authors of this paper produced a series of video tutorials for undergraduate students in a digital media skills course within the Journalism department. The project was intended to help instructors move toward a flipped classroom approach. The videos were produced to align with current best practices for video tutorial design. This study seeks to understand how students interacted with those materials in order to inform the development of future videos. Using YouTube analytics and a student opinion survey, the study tracks the correspondence between the students' descriptions of their video use, and the actual metrics tracked by YouTube.LITERATURE REVIEWState ofVideo TutorialsWhile thousands of online instructional videos are posted on YouTube and massive online open course platforms such as Khan Academy, edX and Coursera (Guo et al., 2014; Pavel, Reed, Hartmann, & Agrawala, 2014), the type of video varies depending on factors such as course purpose and production facilities. Guo et al. outlined six different types of video production styles: Slides, Code, Khan-style, Classroom, Studio and Office Desk. The first three display computer screens or digital material to viewers in different ways, while the latter three include video of the instructor teaching in different physical settings (p. 4). The video styles are often combined in one single video lesson, but are sometimes used individually for instruction (Guo et al., 2014).Videos may differ depending on the type of content being delivered. Specifically, instructional information is often delivered in tutorial form, while conceptual information is often delivered in lecture form (Guo et al., 2014). Tutorials "generated stronger and more numerous peaks than lecture videos" (Kim, Guo, Seaton, Mitros, Gajos, & Miller, 2014, p. 35), meaning there were spikes in the number of views at specific points throughout the video, as viewers navigated through the material differently.Instructors looking to include video lessons in a class can opt to create their own, pull from an existing online course, or curate videos from video hosting sites such as YouTube (Maher, Lipford, & Singh, 2013). While each has its pitfalls and merits, the first option allows the most control to the instructors in the classroom. Developing and producing videos allowed the authors to make the content specific to the course material, brand the videos with the university and department details, and build in navigational tools to help students have more control over how they worked with the content. The branding helps add credibility to the videos (Morian & Swarts, 2012). Keeping the video content in line with specific assignments from the course helps keep students focused and engaged, as Pierce & Fox (2012) demonstrated in their study on the impacts of vodcasts on a pharmacology course. This study uses video tutorials as opposed to lecture videos as the purpose is to help instruct on the use of software.Video production and content.Strong video tutorial design requires a mixture of quality production and organized content. "The qualities that make instructional videos good are the same qualities that make good written procedures: Clear goals, a structure that supports reading to do, concrete details, and user feedback" (Morian & Swarts, 2012, p. …