How long should a lecture be, when it’s a video?

Planning for fall classes

For this fall, I’ve decided to organize my classes in a slightly new format. When we abruptly went to remote teaching due to the virus last semester, I shifted from in-person lectures and discussions to video lectures and zoom discussions. Many of my students took fulltime jobs when they returned home, and one of my sections (US II) had sixty students in it.  So I split that class into three discussion sections.

The semester that begins in late August may have some surprises, but we know from the start that in order to facilitate social distancing in the courses that must meet face to face (lab sciences, studio arts, etc.), courses like history will be delivered in a remote format. But since we have the whole summer to plan this, we have a better opportunity to make this experience valuable for our students.

I’ve begun surveying my students, and I’ll be doing a second round of that once the Learning Management System, D2L, is turned on for the fall – probably the first week of July. So far, nearly all of my students have indicated they plan to be available during the regularly-scheduled class periods for my courses. That means I’ll be able to lecture live during those periods, basically “performing” the lecture in a zoom session in the same way I did in front of a lecture hall.

I’ll continue making weekly videos of my lectures, which students can use to review for quizzes and exams, and can view if they miss a lecture. I’ve been doing this for several semesters now, and it has been helpful to my students even when we were meeting in person. The question now is, how to format these videos? I’m leaning toward turning them into a series of short videos for each lecture, rather than a single long one. That way, students can consume them in bite-size chunks that each focus on one specific point. And I can put little assessments (discussion prompts or previews of quiz or exam questions) at the end of each.

(this is what my YouTube channel looks like now. Lots of long videos may change to even more shorter videos.)

For a while now, I’ve been leaning toward the idea that the ideal time for a YouTube video or podcast episode is short. Like, five or six minutes, tops. I subscribe to a lot of podcasts. My favorites are the shorter ones. Tech-oriented pods like Hyperchange hold my attention. Longer ones, even if they seem to be about a historical topic that might interest me, tend to never get played. Over 90 minutes on “How a Pennsylvania Quaker Became a Prince of Afghanistan”? You couldn’t say whatever needed saying in 60? Or better, in 30? I’m not being entirely fair here – I didn’t listen to the episode, so I don’t know if it’s brilliant and meaningful for the entire 92 minutes. But that’s kind of the point.

The exception may be Joe Rogan. I can listen to a 132-minute interview of Elon Musk. But then again, maybe not. How many other of Joe’s marathon interviews have I actually made it through. Very few.

So I’m thinking of doing these shorter segments, between five and ten minutes long, that add up to a lecture. This will require a bit more production work. But then I’ll be able to place them inside the OER textbooks I create, just before the “Questions for Discussion”. A chapter video that might have been an hour long might turn into six to ten shorter installments. I’ll have to figure out how to group them in YouTube playlists or something. And I can always stitch them together into a single big episode for people who want to view or listen to it that way. Then maybe I could collect information about which formats actually get used. My most-watched video is about three minutes long, so maybe shorter clips will attract more viewers than my students?