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Designing Video for Massive Open Online-Education:
Conceptual Challenges from a Learner-Centered Perspective
Carmen Zahn, Karsten Krauskopf, Jonas Kiener, Friedrich W. Hesse
Table 4: Between group comparisons of deeper level dependent
variables.
Note. a Results of Mann-Whitney-U-Test reported because of
severe positive skewness.
In sum, the results show that students instructed to
discuss freely the source video (discussion task) created
more panels in partnership, wrote more and longer comments,
and were mainly focused on exchanging knowledge
about the filmic style, indicating more collaborative
activity – at least on a surface level. In contrast, participants
in the design condition did integrate aspects of
historical content and filmic style of the newsreel more
often. Students in the discussion condition did not engage
as much in knowledge intensive collaborative activities on
a deeper level as the students in the design condition. In
addition, even though the latter were not so focused on
“talking” about filmic style, they revealed a slightly better
elaboration of visual information and considered visual
details about twice as much, which suggests a more intensive
consideration of the source video on a deeper level.
Discussion
In our study we contrasted two task contexts framing the
active use of video in an online learning setting – discussion
vs. design – and investigated in detail how they would produce
differential effects on student dyads’ online-collaboration
processes and learning outcomes. We assumed that
the different task instructions would stimulate differential
collaborative learning activities and effects on student learning
and we were interested in revealing how exactly these
would differ regarding cognitive outcomes, surface-level
and deeper-level indicators of collaborative learning. We
contribute this research in order to provide a basis for specifying
goal-oriented video usage in MOOCs.
Two main results are important from this point of view: First,
the discussion task stimulated significantly more collabora-
tive activity on a surface level than the design task. Second,
the design task stimulated for more knowledge intensive
elaboration on a deeper level than the discussion task,
especially concerning visual information from the video -
such as paying more joint attention to visual details and
integrating different aspects of video content and style.
These differences occurred while overall content knowledge
acquisition (measured by multiple choice questions in a
post-test) did not differ significantly between conditions. In
other words, under the surface of apparently similar learning
outcomes obtained within the same overall lesson paradigm,
fine-grained differences in group knowledge processes and
specific aspects of online learning became explicit. Such finegrained
differences – as subtle as they may seem – are important
because they can give first hints for designers of
online-learning environments concerning how to meet the
challenge of deciding what students may learn.
Our study addressed online learning and we worked
with real students. In this respect we consider our results
also valuable for the present context of MOOCs. Yet, the
study has its limitations. It was a lab experiment and the
learning environment was not a real MOOC, but a single
private online course (SPOC), thus, results need to be
replicated in a field setting in future research. The study
was conducted in the domain of history, so we must be
hesitant to generalize the results to other domains before
they are replicated there. However, we would like to discuss
some implications of our work for MOOCs. On the
one hand, we would like to invite designers to consider the
conceptual challenge of using more varied tasks around
digital video in MOOCs and thereby map video potentials
for learning with clear learning goals on a very finegrained
level. It is important that the targeted outcome is
clear. Should the students elaborate on the video images
Or does the teacher want them to exchange knowledge
about filmic style as in a film analysis Does she want them
to dig into visual details or lead a vivid discussion On the
Research Track |166