I started asking myself this question in high school, continued to ask it in undergrad and here I am still wondering about it. Does a process of learning always have to produce some suffering? Must every learning journey include a path that we need to follow but don’t really want to take? If that is so, why does it often feel like there is more suffering than joy in institutional education?
It is certainly unfair to place the responsibility onto the education system only. If I rephrase the question as “Why am I often bored?”, it points to a certain lack within me. I am responsible to some degree for what’s happening within me. I am flawed in many ways and it might just be another flaw of mine. But why can’t I stop myself from reading an interesting book till 3 am knowing that I am stealing time from sleep and that I will hate myself at 7 am for doing so when I have to get up and go to work. Perhaps, it is no one’s fault. There is just a gap between an individual and an institution. Is it possible to close that gap?
Can video-based learning help close the gap or at least make it sufficiently narrow? We chose VBL as a team because all four of us find this medium engaging. While reading research papers related to VBL, it immediately struck me how many researchers suggest that there is an ideal video length when it comes to generating and maintaining student engagement. The general consensus is to keep it short. For example, Brame recommends making video lessons around 6 minutes long. Her rationale is that it manages intrinsic load and “it may decrease mind wandering” (2016, p. 3). Intrinsic cognitive load is the effort associated with a specific topic (“Cognitive load”, 2021). Did you interpret it as I did?
So we need to create short videos because the content might require so much mental effort to understand it and it might be so boring unengaging that people can only handle 5-7 minutes of it. Am I the only one who is bothered by this? As a team, we chose the LinkedIn learning course, which follows the short video strategy. The content was not difficult to understand, but it did make my mind wander.
I went to Youtube instead and watched an extremely interesting lecture on psychoanalysis. It was 45 minutes long. While I occasionally watch short Youtube videos with a zero cognitive load such as music videos, cats fighting, drunken car accidents in Russia, I prefer long educational videos. Chess grandmasters teaching end game strategy, comedians teaching the art of creating a joke or a funny story, parenting experts teaching how to manage children’s difficult behaviours. A few days ago I watched a 2.5-hour episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast when a physicist Brian Greene came on as a guest and talked about black holes among other things.
I am sure that you all have your own curiosities that you are passionate about and can spend hours watching videos on the subject. Many of you are passionate about teaching. Don’t you wish that video-based learning you encounter in institutional education was as engaging and as interesting as your favourite documentaries or educational Youtube videos you watch in your own spare time? Can you imagine watching hours of videos in this program and enjoying them? What would it take for that to happen? Is it really that naive to dream about a day when schools, colleges and universities provide video-based learning as engaging as Youtube? Does institutional education have to be boring?
References
Brame, C. J. (2016). Effective educational videos: Principles and guidelines for maximizing student learning from video content. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 15(4), es6. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-03-0125
Cognitive load. (2021, March 25). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load
I get these types of questions from my students as well. I have them do lab reports that summarize what they have learned. They agree it’s super helpful for learning, reviewing and retening the information, but they complain about how much time it takes. I tell that they are here for change – to be smarter – to learn. And change isn’t easy and doesn’t happen immediately. While I do agree that having fun and being engaged in the content can make the learning journey more entertaining, learning is still a process that takes time and effort. Otherwise, we’d all be super smart and know everything!
Both cognitive load and motivation are complex questions, to put it mildly, and they are very much intertwined. A big part of the challenge to understand them is the fact that learning is an epistemological process. Unlike loading a truck with bricks of knowledge, it’s more like mixing ingredients (many of them only partly understood) to make a stew that will be different from the sum of its ingredients if prepared or seasoned in different ways. That is why theory only takes us so far, and then we have to get into empirical research – real-world explorations – to see what actually works and how, not only at the curricular level but even the individual level. Much can be learned from the crafts of both teaching and film-making.
Another angle on these questions is edutainment versus education – where is the line between passively watching documentaries and engaging actively with the narrative, applying it to problems, reading more about it, discussing it with others. As with other discussions about video based learning in the cohort, there seems to be an emerging understanding that how it’s used in a broader setting is one of the key elements in its potential success.