Instructor’s position affects learning from video lectures in Chinese context: an eye-tracking study

ABSTRACT

Although more and more online courses use video lectures that feature an instructor and slides, there are few specific guidelines for designing these video lectures. This experiment tested whether the instructor should appear on the screen and whether her position on the screen (left, middle, right of the content on the slides) influenced students. Students were randomly assigned to watch one of four video lectures on the topic of sleep. The results showed that the video lectures with an instructor’s presence (regardless of position) motivated students more than the video lecture without an instructor presence did. Learning performance and satisfaction were highest when the instructor appeared on the right side of the screen. Furthermore, eye movement data showed that compared to students in all other conditions, students in the middle condition paid more attention to the instructor and less attention to the learning content, and switched more between instructor and learning content. The findings highlight the positive effects of the instructor appearing on the right side of the screen in video lectures with slides.

KEYWORDS:

• Instructor position
• learning performance
• attention allocation
• video lectures
• split attention

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Research Projects of Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of Ministry of Education of China under Grant [19XJC880006]; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant [61877024; 62007023]; the Gansu Province Educational Science ‘13th Five-Year Plan’ Projects for Universities and Vocational Colleges under Grant [GS[2018]GHBBK017]; the Social Sciences Foundation of Shaanxi Province under Grant [2020P021]; and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central University of China under Grant [2020YBZZ035].

Conflict of interest statement

There is no conflict of interest, as we conducted this study only as part of our research programme.

Ethical statement

All procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [grant number 61877024;62007023]; Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of Ministry of Education of China [grant number 19XJC880006]; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central University of China [grant number 2020YBZZ035]; Gansu Province Educational Science “13th Five-Year Plan” Projects for Universities and Vocational Colleges [grant number GS[2018]GHBBK017]; Social Sciences Foundation of Shaanxi Province [grant number 2020P021].