Structure and chunk your video lecture content

Finding the ‘chunks’

A useful starting point when converting your content is to reflect on your on-campus practice. How do you usually structure your time? Do you talk continuously about a single narrow topic for the entire duration? That’s unlikely. You’re much more likely to present a series of interconnected topics and concepts, each section focussing on a key idea or learning objective, that comprise a broader concept. Perhaps you begin your hour by going over the ideas covered that week? Perhaps you conclude with a summation, reinforcing how all the issues you explored fit together? At one point you might switch to some demonstrations, working through problems on a whiteboard. More than likely you break up your presentation with questions and discussions, giving your students opportunity to reflect and engage (and speaking without break for an hour can be exhausting!)

All of these “chunks” in your face-to-face delivery provide valuable break points you can use to plan and structure your online experience.

Like a good argument, an effective series of video lectures has a clear structure, which aids topic conceptualisation and relationship modelling. 

Each sub-objective might make a self-contained point relating to a learning objective, but work together to paint a bigger picture.

The natural break points you use in the classroom can be a great starting point to split a 1-hour long video into four of five shorter videos (including an introduction and a conclusion). If you’re doing a more or less direct adaptation, once you’ve taken out the settling down, discussions, question and answers and activities (which can be repurposed into enhanced digital forms), you’ll find that your hour-long lecture almost invariably translates into somewhere between 30-40 minutes of video time. 

In a lecture or series of lecture videos, the more explicit you make this structure, and the more attention you give the connective tissue that links the issues to each other and the overarching topic, the easier it is for a learner to follow along. 

How Long is a Piece of String? Content Video?

There are some studies that suggest 6 minutes is the ideal length for videos to maintain attention spans, and others that look at the cognitive demands involved with learning a threshold concept. One important caveat with attention spans is that the original highly-cited research was done in the context of MOOCs (Guo & Rubin, n.d.). These are optional, free, on-demand, and completely online courses. Some recent studies have challenged the six minute findings (Lagerstrom, Johanes & Ponsukcharoen, 2015; Geri & Winer, 2017).

The motivation of a student engaging with lecture content is different enough from MOOCs to provide a more generalised rule: let the video length fit the topic structure and concept. When adapting your content for the first time, you may find this sits somewhere around the 12 minute mark per video, and upwards of 20, but there’s no hard and fast rule. 

At the shorter end of the scale, if there’s a particularly important point or topic, consider making a dedicated video just for it. A concentrated 3-6 minute video that focuses on a core or difficult concept can be a boon for student comprehension and revision, particularly when paired with an exercise. This can be particularly helpful for revision if it’s a tricky concept students find themselves returning to.

When it comes to length, it’s not so much about the numbers – it’s more useful to focus on how well students understand their objectives, how clearly the content is designed to aid cognitive processing, and how students actually engage with the ideas expressed. 

Benefits to Chunking

Finally, chunking provides moments to break from delivering didactic content for students to pause, reflect, and apply. This has important implications for students in terms of their cognitive processing (Meyer, 2014).

Questions that you might have posed to students in the classroom can be asked instead in a discussion panel or in a quiz (more on this in our “Video Learning Activities” guide). You can also intersperse your content with other video forms: perhaps a short video demonstration where you walk through a problem, or a documentary clip from YouTube?

As you go, you’ll find breaking your content up into smaller components will open up new opportunities for student engagement. Join us in the next article as we look at How to Introduce and Frame Your Video Content and Objectives.