Short Videos, or Long Videos? A Study on the Ideal Video Length in Online Learning

Online video lectures and tutorials have been gaining a lot of attention especially during the year 2020. The main reason behind this massive popularity was the global transition towards E-learning and distance learning methods right after the pandemic. However, teachers and instructors have been facing the challenge of keeping students engaged through out these videos. In this study, the length and the entertainment level of video lectures are compared against the performance of students. Two groups of engineering students from one course were involved in the study. The first group were provided with relatively short lecture videos while as the second group were provided with longer lecture videos. The results showed that students in the first group had statistically significantly better performance in the course. Further, short videos were statistically significantly more entertaining than long videos. However, students who believed that the video lectures were not informative scored statistically significantly lower grades then other students. The findings also showed that the delivered information in videos, that were shorter than 3 minutes, were insufficient and incomplete. The results of the study also suggest that the optimum length for a lecture or a tutorial video is between 6 to 10 minutes for engineering students.