Learnersourcing Subgoal Labels for How-to Videos

Websites like YouTube host millions of how-to videos, but their interfaces are not optimized for learning. Previous research suggests that people learn more from how-to videos when the videos are accompanied by outlines showing individual steps and labels for groups of steps (subgoals). We envision an alternative video player where the steps and subgoals are displayed alongside the video. To generate this information for existing videos, we introduce learnersourcing, an approach in which intrinsically motivated learners contribute to a human computation workflow as they naturally go about learning from the videos. To demonstrate this method, we deployed a live website with a workflow for constructing subgoal labels implemented on a set of introductory web programming videos. For the four videos with the highest participation, we found that a majority of learner-generated subgoals were comparable in quality to expert-generated ones. Learners commented that the system helped them grasp the material, suggesting that our workflow did not detract from the learning experience.