教育工作者需要更好的视频分析来衡量学习

从 2016 和 2017年版本 of 流媒体杂志 100家最重要的在线视频公司名单, I count three that provide innovative viewership data analysis services as their core business, in addition to the many others that offer analytics peripheral to other services. 这三个是 Conviva, Mux, Vidyard, which have collectively raised at least $100 million in publicly announced venture capital investment over the past few years. Viewership analysis is big business—content creators 和 owners place high value on insight into their content consumers.

当涉及到教学媒体, viewership metrics are of serious interest to the extent that they inform companies about how viewing habits influence learning. We shouldn’t yearn for huge viewership numbers for the sake of huge viewership numbers: If a lecture video is watched over 和 over again by the same captive audience, 这可能表明视频存在重大问题. Students want to learn the material 和 continue to the next topic, 所以如果他们看视频不止一两次, it is reasonable to conclude that they’re having a hard time grasping the explanation, rather than assume they’re choosing to spend their time rewatching it for pleasure.

不幸的是, 教师只能接触到基本的信息, 如果有任何指标——视频播放了多少次, 多长时间一出戏会持续到视频结束, 可能还有哪些学生看了. 这些数据对一个有责任心的教育者来说用处有限. What sort of interventions are effective 和 appropriate if a teacher only knows which videos aren’t being watched to completion, 哪些是被意外频繁地监视的, possibly which individual students are watching them too much (和 may benefit from a possibly unwanted check-in)?

What viewership behaviors for instructional video can we measure that may be more actionable? 更多的 interesting than how many times a student watched a video is what they did during each video viewing session. 如果学生们认为他们迷路了, they’ll seek back to some point in the video where they felt they were not yet lost. 因为我们可以简单地记录“seek”事件,我们可能会发现, 在总, students tend to frequently seek back to rewatch a particular portion of a video, so we may be able to infer from that behavior what the specific problem with the video was. We may alternatively conclude that the portion students are rewatching is indeed difficult material, we may decide to provide additional material to assist students struggling with that concept. 重点是，对于教育视频, it’s more important to know what parts of the video students are spending time on rather than how much total time they’re spending.

There are products for educational video that attempt to blur the line between instruction 和 assessment by pausing the video at specified places to pop-quiz students, either to assess their comprehension or to prime their focus for the upcoming content. These “in-video” questions are supported natively by many learning management systems 和 video management platforms as well as offered as a core product by companies like PlayPosit (原eduCanon)或 EDpuzzle that allow videos hosted by YouTube 和 other popular streaming platforms to be augmented with in-video quizzes.

This is a welcome augmentation 和 gives teachers a mechanism to very directly gauge student engagement 和 comprehension. I would caution against allowing that line between instruction 和 assessment to blur entirely, 然而. There should be a difference between the kinds of questions you would place in the middle of an instructional video 和 those you would put on a test. A very difficult question to assess mastery of material—like one you would put on a formal test—could derail a student’s learning process if used in-video. In-video questions ought to be relevant 和 reinforce the instruction in the video rather than prematurely challenging the students to demonstrate the ability to reflect 和 build on the teaching.

[本文发表于2018年1月/ 2月号。 流媒体杂志 作为“衡量学习的分析”."]