Creating Mini-Lecture Videos: How long is too long?

I am a big proponent of the use of videos in online courses. I believe they are a great way to foster engagement. During the inter-sessions (Summer and Winter) when I am prepping my courses I always review my mini-video lectures to update them if needed. Since I will be creating new mini-video lectures for one course I will be teaching this Summer, I decided to look into some best practices for creating mini-video lectures. Even though I use a pretty good algorithm for this, I always like to stay updated.

One interesting read I found was from a branding organization called Wistia that did research on the correlation between attention spans and the length of videos. I think it is beneficial to sometimes look for resources outside of academia, particularly in the area of sales and marketing, because, in a way, our students are like our customers, and they have a choice of where to receive their education so I think we should always try to use strategic practices to enhance satisfaction. Marketing companies are well versed in these practices, sometimes, mores than educational institutions. This makes sense. While student satisfaction is important to me, student knowledge acquisition and satisfactory demonstration of learning objectives are more important. Nonetheless, a happy balance of the two would be ideal.

In this interesting article, Wistia shared that the sweet spot of a video is really 2 minutes. After this there is a pretty sharp decline in the attention span. Now I  know that a 2 minute lecture is not achievable for our purposes (at least not in most cases) but not to worry, there's more news. The organization also found that a video that is 6-12 minutes could also desirable- and this is not a bad time team for a mini-lecture video in my opinion. This was actually the time frame I was also working with before so I was happy to see that I was on the right track. 

One point they did make was to proceed with caution for any videos longer than 12 minutes. I could agree with that- especially for a recorded video. If you would like to read up about this more, check out the link here- https://wi.st/2XLNI26

Please note that this is not a systematic review or even a scholarly piece of work by academic standards. But it is a nice resource and reference for those interested. 

I'd love to hear what your current time from for recoded lectures are for a fully online course. Be sure to share your comments in The Online Educator Facebook Group by clicking the link HERE. Also, as a treat don’t forget to GRAB YOUR FREE GUIDE to the 3 Secrets to Teaching Online Successfully.