Instructor Presence, Visual Attention, and Learning in Educational Video: Content Difficulty Matters

摘要

In an effort to reach more students, educators are designing online learning experiences, particularly in the form of online videos. While many instructional videos feature a picture-in-picture view of instructor, it is not clear how instructor presence influences learners' visual attention and what it contributes to learning and affect. On one hand, instructor presence could elicit beneficial socio-emotional responses and provide additional nonverbal modalities of interaction. On the other hand, it introduces complex visual stimuli that may distract learners and hinder cognition, especially when the content itself has already imposed a high intrinsic cognitive load. This study explored the impact of instructor presence on visual attention, learning and affect in mathematics instructional videos of varying content difficulty. Thirty-six participants (age 18-21, 21 female) each viewed two 10-minute-long mathematics videos (easy and difficult topics), either with instructor present or absent. When instructor was present, the main frame was devoted to a Khan Academy style pencast, and the bottom right-hand corner displayed a shoulder-up video of the instructor. Findings suggest considerable dwell times when the instructor was present in either easy topic (25%) and or difficult topic (22%) video, even though the instructor only occupied approximately 7% of the entire screen. Also, the effect of content difficulty on the instructor fixation count percentage was significant, F (1, 34) = .042, p .05, ?·2 = .130, with more fixations devoted to the instructor in easy topic video. Although no significant difference in learning transfer was found for either topic, participants' ability to recall information from the easy topic video was better when instructor was present, F (1, 34) = 8.588, p .05, ?·2 = .202. Finally, instructor presence had a positive effect on participants' perceived learning and satisfaction for both topics and led to a lower level of self-reported mental effort for difficult topic.