Do Students actually watch recorded Zoom lectures?

I’m con­tin­u­ing to parse the data from 6 years of Kaltura at VCC.

Kaltura main­tains data on num­bers of views for each video so we are able to count the num­ber of videos that have had zero views over a select­ed time peri­od.

Around 18% of all videos uploaded to Kaltura in 2023 had not been viewed by the end of 2024. And for videos uploaded in 2024, the fig­ure is 24%. 𝘍𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘰𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸𝘦𝘥.

When it comes to videos orig­i­nat­ing in Zoom, the stats are even more strik­ing. 35% of Zoom videos uploaded in 2023 had yet to be viewed by the end of 2024, while for Zoom record­ings uploaded in 2024, the fig­ure was 74%. Some­where between 35 and 75% of Zoom record­ings uploaded to Kaltura are nev­er watched.

Is this a big problem?

Record­ing Zoom lec­tures as they are deliv­ered does not add sig­nif­i­cant over­head in terms of instruc­tor effort. The abil­i­ty to auto­mate the upload­ing of Zoom videos to Kaltura also removes an addi­tion­al time-con­sum­ing step. So should we con­tin­ue to record and upload Zoom lec­tures?

Based on the stats report­ed here, I would say yes (for the occa­sion­al view­er who was­n’t able to attend the orig­i­nal lec­ture), but be aware that it is very like­ly that most stu­dents won’t view them, espe­cial­ly if they attend­ed the orig­i­nal Zoom ses­sion in real time. The idea that stu­dents will rewatch a lec­ture that they attend­ed is not borne out in our data.

So… don’t rely on Zoom record­ings as the only way to meet a par­tic­u­lar learn­ing out­come, or to cov­er a key point in your con­tent. Record­ed Zoom lec­tures are a ‘nice to have’ but stats sug­gest that they may not con­tribute sig­nif­i­cant­ly to stu­dent learn­ing.

Of course, there are oth­er issues to con­sid­er when upload­ing record­ed lec­tures, includ­ing appro­pri­ate chunk­ing — 50% of Zoom videos uploaded to our Kaltura plat­form exceed 20 min­utes in length — anoth­er rea­son not to watch.