Educational video content is one of the most important learning mediums of the modern era. Recent estimates suggest that 99% of educational institutions rely on video content to inform, entertain, and improve student knowledge.
Although millions of learning institutions rely on video content every day, few (if any) effectively measure and increase student engagement. Even if video campaigns are created at the touch of a button, measuring their impact can be a difficult learning curve for many learning institutions. Armed with the right processes, educational facilities could make an enormous difference in how students interact with their programs.
Here, we examine the importance of measuring student engagement with university video content and its impact on the educational community.
The Benefits of Educational Video Content
The benefits associated with videos cannot be underestimated. There are three proven advantages of using educational content in the classroom: satisfaction, recall, and learning reinforcement.
According to recent estimates, roughly 91% of institutions believe that video enhances student satisfaction. Higher student satisfaction leads to a greater educational retention rate, boosting admissions over time.
Recent studies have shown that educational videos and long-term memory are interlinked. Students who watch videos to learn new information have a 100% better recall rate than those who learn from other mediums, enhancing performance across disciplines.
Finally, educational video content caters to the largest demographic of students: visual learners. More than 65% of today’s students learn better through dynamic video formats, increasing their attention, motivation, and engagement.
Using educational videos in the classroom not only benefits students and teachers but also staff and faculty members across your institution. Properly measuring student engagement will lead to greater insights about the learning process, current curricula, and future opportunities.
How to Measure Student Engagement
It’s important to be aware of the metrics used for measuring student engagement before launching into an educational video campaign. The most common ones include:
- Watch Time: the seconds, minutes, or hours of educational video watched by a single student
- Percent of Video Completion: how much of a video has been watched out of its total run time (e.g., one out of four hours, or 25%)
- Access Dates: the dates or set of dates in which an educational video was accessed by student demographics
- Unique Viewers: the number of unique views on a given video divided by the number of total views (ninety unique out of 100 views, or 90% unique viewers)
- Number of Videos Watched: how many videos a student has watched within a certain period of time
Each metric can be calculated by hand, although its complexity and rapidly changing status are extremely difficult to track manually. For this reason, it’s best to rely on a reporting API to consolidate metrics into a single location.
Five Critical Tips for Increasing Student Engagement
Now that you know how to measure student engagement, it’s time to consider new methods for enhancing your metrics:
- Focus on five-second introductions. Be concise, clear, and thesis driven.
- Ask rhetorical questions—for example, “What did we learn in this video?”
- Use emotions rather than pure logic. Have acting talent be personal.
- Rely on annotations, cues, and visual graphics—the more, the merrier!
- Keep it short and sweet. Videos under two minutes are better received.
The more that you refine your approach to educational video content, the higher your student engagement rates will be. Hard data, coupled with video best practices, are essential to success for many institutions of higher learning.
Warpwire Is a Leader in Educational Video Content
While each of these tips will help with measuring and improving student engagement with video content, they are not always easy to use without a recognized software system. Many techniques can heavily benefit from using a content management system to host, protect, and send videos to audience members from a single location. That’s where Warpwire comes in.
This program offers a full suite of services, including but not limited to:
- Full-service video CMS
- Suite of integrations for multiple uses
- 100% customizable API
The Warpwire team is proud to expand educational possibilities for clients all over the US, boosting student engagement rates and enabling real-time measurement, all at the touch of a button.
Warpwire’s video platform provides analytics to help you track media assets, media libraries, and system-wide usage. Designed to explore engagement, Warpwire’s reports provide deep insight into how your institution interacts with media.
To see how we can help you better leverage your video content, get in touch with us today!
