Does video length impact view counts?

(Time to Read: 2 mins.)

In my ongo­ing efforts to extract mean­ing from our Kaltura data, I looked into the rela­tion­ship between video length and the num­ber of times a video has been viewed.

What I expected to see

Received wis­dom holds that stu­dents won’t engage with longer videos, so I expect­ed there to be a ‘sweet spot’ for length, after which views would fall off. I expect­ed to see some­thing like a bell curve with the mean being around the 5‑minute mark and a long tail of ever-decreas­ing views as video length increased.

What the data show

As you can see in the graph, our data shows some­thing quite dif­fer­ent, with a much more gen­er­al spread of views. There are some obvi­ous high points around the 30 and 50 minute marks, and some video lengths for which there are decid­ed­ly few­er views.

What’s going on?

Admit­ted­ly the data I’m using is far from per­fect and there is a lot of noise that my best efforts at clean-up will not have removed. Also, the rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of active upload­ers (among fac­ul­ty there are around 250 who have uploaded con­tent since 2023) means that some instruc­tors and some sub­ject areas can skew the results. A case in point is the peak around 52 min­utes — one Maths class that made exten­sive use of video was respon­si­ble for almost 50% of the videos in this cat­e­go­ry.

So, should we keep our videos short?

Bear in mind that I have only looked at the rela­tion­ship between video length and num­ber of views — my data has noth­ing to say about whether longer videos with lots of views were an effec­tive or inef­fec­tive tool for stu­dent learn­ing. In fact, research stud­ies (e.g. Afı­fy 2020, Brame 2017) con­sis­tent­ly indi­cate that there 𝘪𝘴 a good rea­son for keep­ing videos short. This is large­ly to do with man­ag­ing cog­ni­tive load, main­tain­ing stu­dent engage­ment, and pro­mot­ing active learn­ing, and is informed by May­er’s 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 (e.g. May­er & Moreno 1998).

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Ref­er­ences:

Afı­fy, M. K. (2020). Effect of inter­ac­tive video length with­in e‑learning envi­ron­ments on cog­ni­tive load, cog­ni­tive achieve­ment and reten­tion of learn­ing. 𝘛𝘶𝘳𝘬𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘖𝘯𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘑𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘌𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 21(4), 68–89.

Brame, C. J. (2017). Effec­tive edu­ca­tion­al videos: Prin­ci­ples and guide­lines for max­i­miz­ing stu­dent learn­ing from video con­tent. 𝘊𝘉𝘌—𝘓𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘌𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯.

May­er, R. E., & Moreno, R. (1998). A cog­ni­tive the­o­ry of mul­ti­me­dia learn­ing: Impli­ca­tions for design prin­ci­ples. 𝘑𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘦𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺, 91(2), 358–368.