Video Lectures in eLearning

Background

Mini-lectures are short videos purposefully fragmented, and grounded on cognitive principles such as the strategy of ‘chunking’ content into meaningful pieces, a practice that increases the probability of recall (Miller, 1956). Mini-lectures have the potential of becoming a successful practice especially in large enrollment campus courses as well as in fully online courses, especially with the expansion of new approaches such as the flipped classroom and MOOCs. They used to be commonly associated with online instruction, but in reality mini-lectures have become part of any mode of instruction, including fully face-to-face courses that use flipped learning approach. While some authors have described them as “60-second presentations” (Shieh, 2009), there are some that are 1-3 minutes long and they are called “micro-lectures”, and there are some that are a longer like 4-8 minutes long and they are also known as “mini-lectures.” They are shorter than a traditional +30-minute lecture in a face-to-face meeting, therefore the names “mini” or “micro” suits the concept well. Micro or Mini-lectures are short, to the point and focused on one topic at time. They probably started as an attempt to include instructor’s presence in online learning (Shea & Bidjerano, 2009) by imitating the “long standing educational tradition of lecturing” (Morris, 2009). The concept of mini-lecturing captured global attention in a Chronicle of Higher Education article (Shieh, 2009) titled “These Lectures are gone in 60 seconds.” Sheih described mini-lectures as one- to three-minute videos specifically formatted to online and mobile learning courses. The author credited the design of the format to David Penrose for San Juan College, Farmington, NM, although other instructors have also advocated a similar lecture model (McGrew, 1993; Shieh, 2009).