I often find myself in conversations that hinge in part on the relative efficacy of courses where the instruction is delivered through prerecorded videos compared to courses where instruction is delivered through live lectures¹¹ I am sometimes surprised that these are the two being compared. Intuitively, videos seem more like textbooks than like lectures to me, but that does not seem to be the common view. Many courses seem to have text + exercises + illustrated speech, where the illustrated speech is either live or recorded.. On the pro-video side, we have such considerations as:

These are not exhaustive lists, and some people might disagree with the topics I chose to list. There are also topics where I’ve seen ample arguments on both sides, such as integrating learning exercises with the instruction²² There’s also a debate about the efficacy of in-class versus at-home exercises, mirroring the in-class versus at-home instruction, but the details are different enough to be out of scope for this post.. The entire topic is complicated, which is probably part of why conversations hinging on it continue to arise.

I’ve recently had my attention drawn to another difference between live and recorded lectures, which is the subject of the rest of this post.

Informal observations

I’ve recently started working closely with our professional advisors in the school of computing, which has led to a number of insights I might not otherwise have had. One of those insights was that we have students who struggle in our asynchronous video-based courses much more than they do in our synchronous lecture-based courses, and that those students often cite that course structure as contributing to their struggles. We do not have reports of the opposite: while we have some courses that offer no way to make up for a missed lecture, we do not see students who struggle more in those classes than in others, nor do the advisors get many complaints about those course structures.

Additionally, when we ask instructors of video-based courses to analyze those students who are doing poorly in their courses, many of them appear to engage with all of the assignments and live exercises but view few if any of the videos. When we ask instructors of lecture-based courses the same question, behaviors are more unified: they often skip class first, but within a few weeks they tend to be skipping everything.

I don’t have hard data to back up these observations, nor did those who shared these observations with me. Laws like FERPA and 45 CFR 46 make collecting data about students in a way that is legal to share complicated, which sometimes encourages vague observations instead of crisp data even within the institution. That said, multiple people I’ve interacted with have agreed with these general trends.

Attention ratchet hypothesis

When I was a student, I took a class I did not find interesting. I had trouble caring enough to read the textbook and bumbled through the assignments in hope of enough partial credit to get a high enough grade to not need to take the course again. The course did not have videos, but if it did I assume I’d have watched them at 2× speed while also reading something unrelated, as I sometimes do with other videos today. But I cared enough about passing the class to walk into the classroom, and once I was there I felt social pressure to neither leave early nor do something unrelated to the class, so if I could get the energy to walk in the door, I was locked in and spent an hour attending to instructional material. I passed the class, but not because I was disciplined enough to pass³³ This was my strangest grade. Combining my various exam and assignment grades, I expected a D; but after the term ended I found an A‒ on my transcript. I went to the professor’s office to tell him that I thought he’d made a mistake giving me a grade that high, but he insisted that I deserved the A‒.
Many years later I figured out why the subject of that class was important and studied it on my own. I probably have an A‒ level of understanding now, but I still think I didn’t back then. it: I was just disciplined enough to walk in the door a few times a week, and then socially sensitive enough to be locked in for the rest of the lesson.

I like to think of this as an attention or decision ratchet: if I could give enough cares to make it past the door, the ratchet engaged and I was locked in for an entire lesson. I’ve never found a way of watching videos on my own that could do that: perhaps if they were in a big-screen theater with a crowd of other students watching them too? But even that lacks the social worry of insulting the lecturer by leaving early or going off task.

I was a pretty good student. I found it easy to care about and attend to material in most of my courses; and I still find it easy to care about most ongoing learning today. But there are subjects where I can get my act together enough to walk into the room, but not keep it together long enough to stay looking at the screen for an hour. Sometimes, I need the ratchet.

Other ratchets

I like pondering and thinking through things at length. But I’m not good at doing that when I have distractions at hand. Choosing to walk a good distance with nothing to distract me is a small choice that can ratchet in a lengthy period of thought.

I enjoy paying attention to some types of music. But if I have a recording of the music, I find it hard to pay attention for more than a few minutes, or sometimes even a few seconds. Choosing to enter a performance hall and listen live can give me hours of pleasure because the distractions are not present.

Attention ratchets are an important part of my day-to-day management of my own sometimes-unruly attention⁴⁴ See post 656 for more on tame and wild attentions. When I look at the patterns of students doing poorly in classes, I see evidence that it is an important part of others’ learning as well.