“The Role of Motivation in the Use of Lecture Behaviors in the Online Classroom”

ANNOTATION: Fanguy, M., Costley, J., Lange, C., Baldwin, M., & Han, S. (2018). The role of motivation in the use of lecture behaviors in the online classroom. Journal of Information Technology Education, 17, 471–484. https://doi.org/10.28945/4131

This study presents the results of a survey given to 2,434 students at Open Cyber University in South Korea. OCU is the largest online university in the country, offering 400+ credit classes to some 120,000 students. The goal of this study was to determine the relationship between intrinsic goal orientation and students’ use of video lecture behaviors, defined as pausing, scrolling backward or forward to rewatch or skip content, increasing the playback speed, looking away from the video to focus on the audio, scanning from video to static images and visuals on the page, and pausing the video to look more closely at a visual being presented on the screen. They launched the study because existing research shows conflicting relationships between motivation and video-watching behavior, and at OCU, video lecture makes up the majority of the online instruction.  They used the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich, 1991) to determine motivation, then focused on self-reports of the video lecture behaviors listed above.

Overall, the researchers found that learners with high levels of intrinsic goal orientation (mastery goal orientation) showed more lecture behaviors, and by inference that lecture behaviors may be viewed as a signal of a learner’s willingness to engage with and understand the content. They suggest that part of the correlation with lecture behaviors may also be a result of students’ familiarity with how to learn online. Their work also showed a strong correlation between kinds of lecture behaviors, showing a tendency for students to use a combination of behaviors as a concerted learning strategy. The authors conclude that students should be taught to use lecture behaviors to learn more effectively online; the problem, however, is that the study did not compare actual data on course outcomes and performance toward learning outcomes to the use of lecture behaviors. The work is also limited by the fact that behaviors were determined via a self-report method, and the authors do suggest that this self-report should be measured against actual click-stream data to confirm what behaviors actually happened, at what point, and how often. The third limitation, according to the authors, is that this study was completed in South Korea, the nation with the highest bandwidth per person of any nation in the world. This suggests that students may be more technically literate and comfortable with online environments.

Reflection/Application: I arrived at this study after an initial search for research on the effectiveness of “quick quizzes” to reinforce learning concepts. I found “Student Perspectives of Assessment Strategies in Online Courses.” This study did not focus on quick quizzes, however, as the researchers in this study describe every activity in an online course as a kind of assessment. This particular study included a group of teachers taking courses in school administration. The students were asked to rate twelve different assessments (online activities) in their classes; the list of assessment methods was similar though not exactly the same as the list I found above via AI. Subjects rated the following for enjoyment and also learning value: work samples, Twitter summary, audio recordings, traditional papers, screencasts, group projects, open discussion, paired discussion, video response, field experience, quizzes, and interviews. The students described the online quizzes as “old school” and rated them the lowest for enjoyment, engagement, and transferability of the 12 kinds of online activities offered. Their highest ratings went to more modern activities, and the highest of all, by far, was video response (watching a video and responding to question prompts). Since the courses I create at my own place of work are largely video-based, I found this statistic encouraging but recognized that we may consider adding more meta-instruction to the courses to help direct students toward the best way to learn from video lecture. Second, it may help reinforce the learning content when we present directed video questions or other related application activities at the conclusion of each video—an interesting question for further research.

ADDITIONAL CITATION:

Bailey, Scott, et al. “Student Perspectives of Assessment Strategies in Online Courses.” Journal of Interactive Online Learning, vol. 13, no. 3, 2015, pp. 112–25.