Impact of Lecturer’s Discourse for Students’ Video Engagement: Video Learning Analytics Case Study of MOOCs

Abstract

Lecture videos are amongst the most widely used instructional methods in present Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other digital educational platforms. As the main form of instruction, students’ engagement behaviour with videos directly impacts the students’ success or failure and accordingly, in-video dropouts positively correlate with dropout from MOOCs. The primary focus of previous video learning analytics studies is on analysing video engagement behaviour using explicit factors (i.e. views or annotations). Limited research studies focus on implicit video learning analytics (e.g. pause, seek, content type) and their impact on students’ success, with existing studies addressing video interactions and their relationship with visual transitions. We aim to explore the association between video interactions and non-visual (i.e. verbal or discourse) transition. This research focuses on text (e.g. cohesion and syntactic complexity) and spoken (e.g. speaking rate) discourse features of lecture videos. We conduct a fine-grained analysis of 3.4 million video interactions of two AdelaideX MOOCs – Programming (Code101x) and Cyber, Surveillance and Security (Cyber101x). According to our results, some discourse features (e.g. lexical diversity and causal connectives) demonstrate statistically significant correlation with video interactions. We present insights for educational video design implications based on discourse processing theories.