Last month I watched the IDEAS Seminar on “Beyond the Classroom: Creating Engaging Educational Videos” (Yurchenkov, 2025). If you have read some of my previous blog posts you may noticed several about video lessons. However, several points jumped out at me that I thought I would share specifically about the length of videos (note the full video recording is available). Over the years, many people have discussed how long a course video should be. Of course, we all hope that students are fascinated with our subject and watch everything. But as Forrest Bowlick pointed out, we can look at the LMS data to see that students don’t.
A major consideration, of course, is the purpose of the video. In the IDEAS Seminar, Matt Pierce reported on a TechSmith study which found that people stopped watching because:
- 33% received the info they needed.
- 25% said the video didn’t have info they expected.
- 22% said it was BORING or uninteresting.
- 9% stopped because of poor quality.
And Matt reported that TechSmith also recorded reasons people continue watching:
Screenshot from Matt’s presentation. [NOTE: on the 3rd line, the last word is ‘knowledgeable’]
Richard Mayer’s research shows that breaking a video for a short reflective exercise improves learning. (My previous posts discuss some of his other findings in more detail.)
And as Koby Leff discussed in the seminar, we need to ensure that each of our videos presents as a story. This means providing a beginning, middle, and end for each video.
The final word on length was “As long as necessary, but as short as possible” (I am not sure which speaker said this, but they all seemed to agree).
Reference:
Yurchenkov, S. (Director). (2025, February 27). Beyond the Classroom: Creating Engaging Educational Videos [Broadcast]. In Instructional Design, Engagement, and Support (IDEAS): UMass Amherst. https://www.umass.edu/ideas/seminar/creating-engaging-educational-videos