Explaining Student Behavior at Scale: The Influence of Video Complexity on Student Dwelling Time

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Understanding why and how students interact with educational videos is essential to further improve the quality of MOOCs. In this paper, we look at the complexity of videos to explain two related aspects of student behavior: the dwelling time (how much time students spend watching a video) and the dwelling rate (how much of the video they actually see). Building on a strong tradition of psycholinguistics, we formalize a definition for information complexity in videos. Furthermore, building on recent advancements in time-on-task measures we formalize dwelling time and dwelling rate based on click-stream trace data. The resulting computational model of video complexity explains 22.44% of the variance in the dwelling rate for students that finish watching a paragraph of a video. Video complexity and student dwelling show a polynomial relationship, where both low and high complexity increases dwelling. These results indicate why students spend more time watching (and possibly contemplating about) a video. Furthermore, they show that even fairly straightforward proxies of student behavior such as dwelling can already have multiple interpretations; illustrating the challenge of sense-making from learning analytics.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the Third (2016) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
Number of pages10
Place of PublicationNew York, NY, USA
PublisherACM
Publication date2016
Pages51-60
ISBN (Print)978-1-4503-3726-7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event3rd Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, L@S 2016 - Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Duration: 25 Apr 201626 Apr 2016

Conference

Conference3rd Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, L@S 2016
LandUnited Kingdom
ByEdinburgh
Periode25/04/201626/04/2016
SponsorACM, edX, Google, Instructure, Inc., Microsoft Research, Oracle Academy
SeriesL@S '16

    Research areas

  • dwelling time, information complexity, learning analytics, moocs, student behavior., video

ID: 212431738