Associate Professor Lisa Jacka: Welcome everybody. Thank you for listening to our conversation. Today I have my good friend and colleague Nina Usher with me, who was involved in our asynchronous project. And today I’d like to ask Nina a little bit about some of the work that she did, particularly in looking at very long and dare I say boring videos, and how we make them better and more suited to an asynchronous experience.

Nina Usher: Hi, thank you for having me. Yes, they were very long, boring videos, weren’t they? We started this project with a series of pre-recorded lecture videos that had a variety of different presenters, most of which averaged over an hour, some of them closer to the 2-hour mark of just sheer content. And whilst the content itself was really relevant to the course and we needed the students to know this information—and it was actually going to help them with their professional learning and their teaching—it was very, very hard, even for myself, to get through those videos.

So the idea that came about in terms of trying to make this learning more digestible, more accessible, was to engage in a series of chunking. Chunking for videos is basically breaking down that educational content into smaller logical pieces instead of delivering everything in one big massive block at once. And when we looked at the data analytics from those really long videos, we could see from previous offerings of the course that students weren’t watching the whole thing. Actually, engagement was incredibly low, barely getting through the first few minutes of the content, despite the fact that it was really important for their learning. It was also a requirement for some of their assignments as well to actually have watched and understood that information.

So we wanted to break it down so that it was just a little bit more digestible. We could take the really important content and make it shine. If you think of chunking in terms of a concept, it’s almost like if you’ve got a giant big cake and instead of trying to eat the whole thing all at once, you’re chopping it up into slices. Having a little bit. You can still have your whole cake, but you’ve got it in slices. It’s easier to take in.

Chunking is a really interesting concept and it’s not necessarily new. It’s something that’s been around for a little while. There’s some really amazing research that’s come out from MIT, for example. I know that they did a really big study where they looked at nearly 7 million videos, brought them down to roughly 6 minutes in length. And basically what they found was that students started to actually watch those six-minute videos and they still had all of the content, but they just chunked it into these sections. So it gave students a little bit of power over how they could engage and when they were able to engage in the content. It just made it easier for them to actually understand all the information.

And one of the other reasons that I personally really love this concept of chunking is that there’s really solid research there in terms of the brain and looking at how brains actually process information, which is something that I’m particularly interested in, particularly from an accessibility lens and understanding neurodiversity. And so chunking actually aligns with our working memory, and that’s where we handle new information. Research indicates that we’re only able to juggle three to four complex pieces of information at any one point. So when we’re overloading our brains with really long videos that have lots of movement and lots of things happening, or we’re watching a video of a recording that’s taking place in a lecture theater where there’s someone at the front—there’s just so much going on and that can cause a little bit of a shutdown, so to speak.

When we chunk videos properly, we take something long, reduce it down to shorter bits of information, or we break it up into where the natural points are, it actually helps the brain to digest this information, to take it on.

That’s what we did with our project. We took those very long, very, very long videos and I went through second by second and analyzed where the natural points could be, where we could start to reduce them. So I think for some of them we ended up with three or four different videos from these very long lectures because the content was quite rigorous and there was a lot of information that the students really needed to know in terms of assisting them with their professional learning.

Some of the videos ranged from the 6 to 8 minute mark, I think, and some of them were a little bit longer, closer to the 10 to 15 minute mark. What was really interesting is when we uploaded these edited videos, we could see that those shorter ones were getting higher views. So it actually aligned with what the research has previously suggested with chunked videos. All of a sudden, we had quite a mass uptake in users actually watching this content. Even if it was the 6-minute or the 10-minute video instead of the full 1-hour one, we still had a higher percentage of views than we had had with the previous ones. It was just really interesting to see that reducing that content down and making it a bit more digestible and easier to understand had a big impact.

We then tried to take it a little step further and add some elements of interactivity there for those videos as well, just so that students aren’t just passively watching a recording. And so some of the videos actually also then included little polls and things at the end, which just allowed the students to not necessarily test themselves but just to kind of help consolidate the information that had been explored in those videos. And so again, engagement was really high for content like that.

I think it just really shows that if we can adopt this kind of approach for our asynchronous learning environment, we can really support our students, our learners, to actually engage in the content that we’re trying to teach them. It was a really positive experience, although a very long one in terms of editing because we were taking such big videos and reducing them down.

What I really enjoy about chunked videos is that it’s also giving learners a little bit of control. Even though they can pause those really long videos and revisit concepts, it’s a little bit harder to find where you got up to in an hour and a half lecture recording than it is in a 6-minute chunked video. It makes it easier, I think, for users when they’re on their study desk or on their learning platform in their LMS to see that there’s short videos followed by little bits of paragraphs of information rather than big heavy videos just bundled all together.

So it gives someone the opportunity to go, “Oh, I can watch this 5-minute video right now as I’m getting ready or as I’m doing this other task and then I can come back to the next one later on.” But to sit there and go, “Oh, I have to dedicate an hour and a half to sit here and watch this entire video” can be a little bit overwhelming for some people.

Associate Professor Lisa Jacka: Thanks, Nina. That was a great description of what you did and all the hard work that you put into it and the reasons for doing it. I especially like the idea that it means that we’ve identified the really important parts that a student might not get to when the important bit is at the last five minutes. And when we put it into just five minutes then they actually do get to that part, and I think we did see that in the actual analytics as well, which you did a lot of work looking at. I would like to ask you: what advice would you give to somebody who would like to do this in their course in higher education?

Nina: I found personally going through this process course and course again with my own teaching that for my students, the real hot spot for these chunked videos is that 3 to 6 minute mark. So if I’m coming into a course or going into some planning in advance going, “This is what I’m going to do,” I would just keep those kind of numbers in mind.

There’s a few different approaches that you can take. You can do a full recording and then do the editing and actually find those sections and chunk them down, or you can pre-plan and go, “I’m actually going to do a 6-minute recording just on this topic and I’m going to really make sure that the content is really explicit and straight to the point.”

It’s really interesting when you watch back a recording of yourself delivering content and you realize, “Oh, there’s a little bit of waffling going on here,” or “I’ve said ‘um’ six million times in this one recording.” You can actually forward plan how you’re going to go about whether it’s going to be a full recording that you then edit and then you remove key sections, or if it’s going to be you’re just going to record short 6-minute little videos here, or a 3-minute for the introduction and a 6-minute for the next main topic and then 5 minutes here. So you can pre-plan.

Associate Professor Lisa Jacka: Thanks Nina for sharing your insights on making educational content more accessible and engaging through chunking. For those listening if you’re working with long-form video content in your courses, remember that breaking it down into digestible 3-6 minute segments can dramatically improve student engagement and learning outcomes. We hope this conversation has given you some practical ideas for transforming those marathon lecture recordings into bite-sized, student-friendly content. As Nina showed us, sometimes the best way to help students consume the whole cake is to serve it up in manageable slices. Enjoy!