Rethinking The Studio

This isn't specific to PCE or university leadership, but it's a topic that is increasingly important to universities that have in-sourced their online course production. 

For decades (and certainly the 26 years I've been working in online, distance and technology-mediated education), higher ed has operated under a phantom guidance to keep instructional videos under 8 minutes. The evidence informing the guidance is based on some very old research that suggested learner engagement with video content tends to drop off after 6 to 7 minutes, so the threshold instructional designers began using is 8 minutes.

A team at Northeastern University is pushing back on the "best practice" of 8 minute videos. Their argument is not that the eight-minute guideline is wrong, but they are suggesting that applying it uniformly across all disciplines misses important aspects of how learners process content. A conceptual video on business strategy can benefit from 8 or fewer minutes. A technical walkthrough of an algebra derivation or an accounting calculation might need more time as the learner has to follow an unbroken sequence of steps to master the skill. The Northeastern team suggests that chopping that sequence into shorter clips to satisfy an arbitrary time limit actually hurts retention and disrupts learning.

I see this suggestion as an opportunity for universities to reconsider how they are allocating budget, staff and faculty time on costly studio-based production for video-heavy online courses. There are too many universities now running video production through a full studio model with scripted sessions, camera crews, editing queues, and post-production polish that gets applied to every piece of video content. That model worked when video length was assumed to be short AND alternate methods of video production were sketchy at best.

This is where the growing set of AI enabled video production tools needs to be seriously considered. Even the most inept operations director should be able to recognize the efficiencies afforded by screen capture platforms that can record workflows and automatically generate narrated, edited video in a fraction of the time needed in a studio. Document-to-video platforms are turning scripts and slide decks into finished, narrated videos without a camera or a studio. AI assisted editing tools are handling captioning and pacing adjustments that used to require a team of video editors. Work that used to take days is now completed in a few hours.

None of this means that high-production studios an university campuses are irrelevant. Conceptual, narrative driven videos where an instructor's delivery and framing can genuinely shape a student's mental model can still benefit from high-end costly production. But the universities that are still routing every instructional video through a single, uniform, high cost production pipeline should be aggressively looking at AI-assisted and lower cost methods of video production. Matching production intensity to cognitive demand, rather than to a one size fits all workflow, will bring the cost of online course, and specifically video production, down dramatically.