Many educational organizations are motivated to create and share instructional videos, but there are no guidelines about the presentation styles. In practice, the presentation style of video lectures ranges from simple video capturing of classroom teaching, up to highly elaborate authoring of video presentations that include close-ups and video-cuts of instructors, slides, animations, and interactive drawing boards. In particular, there is limited research about the effects of each presentation style on student learning performance and attitudes. In this work, we examine the effects of video presentation styles in supporting the teaching of mathematics in the secondary education. In addition to a control group that studied through a paper-book, two groups of students attended two distinct styles of video lectures: 1) video capture of class teaching (Talking head style), and 2) close-up video capture of an interactive drawing board with voice-over (Khan style). The participants of our study consisted of 36 students (15 boys and 21 girls, 16 years old), who received the respective three treatments (paper book, talking head, khan style), over the course of three math modules in three weeks' time. We found that learning effects show up only after the second week and that the Talking Head style was more effective than the book for complex topics.
Video, talking head lectures, khan style, satisfaction, playfulness, enjoyment, e-learning, performance
K.3.1 [Computers and Education]: Computer Uses in Education - Computer-managed instruction (CMI).
Video lectures have been growing in popularity and many organizations, universities and open learning systems are employing them as a main- or self-study medium, such as Coursera, Udacity, EdX, Khan Academy, TED, and Video Lectures. Although there is a growing interest and use, the benefits and the drawbacks of each different lecture type have not studied yet. The main goal of our research is to explore the effectiveness of different video lectures in teaching mathematics. For this purpose, we produced two different kinds of video lectures: 1) Video capturing of a typical class course and 2) video capturing of an interactive drawing board with voice over. Next, we employed three groups of students, namely two groups for the two kinds of video lecture, as well as one control group. In addition to learning performance measurement, we also employed the enjoyment construct, which students reported at the end of their participation.
Research has shown that students benefit from video
based or assisted learning [
Indeed, videos lectures can take diverse forms and the
video lecture style might have effects on important
educational parameters such as learning performance
and enjoyment. One of the most commonly used is the
talking-head lecture, which is the type used by most of
the universities (e.g., Stanford, MIT courseware).
Another style of video lecture that is growing in
popularity is the Khan academy style (hereinafter Khan
style). Therefore, the main research goals of our study
is to explore the differences among talking head and
khan video lectures style, and to compare the
differences to the traditional paper book that has been
used for centuries during the self-study of the student.
The motivation for study is based on the importance of
enjoyment derived from a teaching method and is in
alignment with previous research [
We produced two styles of videos, one with teacher’s participation (Talking Head) using the traditional green chalkboard (Figure 2) and the other one with the teacher’s voice over the interactive drawing board (Figure 3). In our study, the duration of each video was 10 minutes. For the talking head style of video lectures, the content looks like the traditional lecture and it has been a popular video lecture format for many online videos because it is easy to capture and share without going through a resource intensive video editing postproduction. In these videos the teacher was presenting a summary of the unit he had taught. For the Khan Style lecture, the viewer concentrates upon the boards’ content. Only the teachers’ voice and the exercises are participated in this kind of video. The video content focuses on what is being written on the board. The bamboo pen was used for the creation of these videos. This kind of video is very popular in the Khan Academy and Udacity, which was the motivation for this study. In both video lecture styles, the teacher was presenting the exact same summary of the module he had taught during the normal course hours.
Thirty-six experimental subjects, 15 boys and 21 girls (16 years old) participated in this study. The students wrote a pre-test on mathematics before the separation into groups, so that the groups are equivalents in terms of previous math performance. After the test we had three groups with 12 students each with a grade average in the pre-test of 16.5 out of 20 points. The presentation of the video took place in the computer laboratory. Every student was watching the 10 minutes video on the computer. One group watched the video with the teacher making a presentation (Talking Head lecture); another group watched the video with a closeup of an interactive board (Khan Style) and the control group browsed through a paper book for the same amount of time.
Learning Performance
The knowledge acquired during the treatment.
The study consisted of two parts. In the first part, each one of the groups studied for their module by employing the respective treatments (two styles of video and the paper book). This part of the study was held three times for each group for three different modules of mathematics. Students had ten minutes to watch each style of video and the control group to read the respective module from the book. At the end of each time students solved a test according to the unit they had taught, which lasted twenty minutes. In all cases, the experimental procedure was very strict with regard to the time that the students had. For the implementation of the second part we employed a standard questionnaire which consisted of three questions. The purpose of the questions was to examine the Enjoyment factor (Table 1). Finally, we analysed the data with the use of SPSS program. We used the Mann-Whitney U Test for the processing because of the small sample.
In the following table we summarize the results of our study. performance. During the first two modules the learning performance of the three groups has no significant difference. However, at the third module the learning performance of the Talking Head group was significantly better than the Khan Style group (p<0.05). i.d. Insignificant Difference; s.d. Significant Difference Z -0.058 -2.07 -2.01 -0.38 -0.17 0.00 -0.99 -1.16 -0.52 -1.78 -2.39 -1.48
U 71 36.5 37.5 65.5 69 72 55 52 63 41.5 31 46.5
P 0.95 0.04* 0.04* 0.71 0.86 1.00 0.32 0.25 0.60 0.08 0.02* 0.14
Result i.sd. s.d. s.d. i.d. i.d. i.d. i.d. i.d. i.d. i.d. s.d. i.d.
Conclusion and Further Research
We found significant statistical differences between the
tested video styles and there are also some interesting
explanations and useful conclusions. Most notably, the
enjoyment measure was reported higher in the control
group, who employed a paper-book to study the three
modules in mathematics. The familiarity of the students
with paper books might be one explanation of enjoying
this medium in comparison to the video medium.
Another explanation is that students of the Talking
Head group and Khan Style group had not employed
any video before for their self-study. The preference of
video styles might depend on previous exposure to
them and there might be cultural and personal
parameters, which have to be controlled in further
research. In conclusion, further research should
pretest students according to their previous exposure to
video lectures and to group them accordingly.
Actual learning performance was slightly improved
when the students employed the videos in comparison
to the paper book, but this is only after the second
week, which indicates that the students need to
become familiar with new teaching styles. In particular,
there was higher performance in the case of the Talking
Head over the Khan Style video lecture. Although we
hypothetized that the Khan Style might be result in
better performance this was not true. One explanation
is that the students felt more familiar with the Talking
Head video lecture. Notably, the improvement in
learning performance was higher for the last
mathematics module, which was the most complicated
module of the three. Therefore, there might be an
influence of the type of course on the learning
performance across the self-study mediums and video
lectures seem to be superior for complex learning.
Moreover, further research should measure the learning
performance over more teaching modules than three
and over more courses than mathematics.
It is important to note that students watched the videos
linearly and did not have the time to watch the video
again or reply it. In particular, the use of video did not
give the opportunity to students to have any interaction
with it when they were watching the video, in contrast
to the paper book treatment group, who was observed
to browse through the pages. Therefore, in further
research, we must allow the students to interact with
the videos [
The authors would like to express their gratitude to all of the students for volunteering their time. Our very special thanks go to the math teacher, of the, for his assistance in our study. We would like also to thank EC project for providing the equipment.