I personally do take some issue with this - it's a quick boost for engagement metrics, sure, but some topics actually need time and space to breathe. Short videos work for hammering key bullet points into students, but when you're dealing with more complex content - anything skill-, rather than knowledge-based, for example - then it gets more complicated than that.
Shorter videos are more likely to attract attention. With that said, attention/engagement is an important factor when teaching, not the end goal, and complex ideas can be poorly sub-divided or simplified to fit into prescriptive chunk lengths.
Overly bitty videos in training courses are due to people applying a general guideline too rigidly, without thinking about other relevant factors.
People can chain together as many lessons as they would like.
When targeting a market, you want to include as many people as possible… Targeting the people who have 45 minutes excludes the others.
Longer than that, I feel pressure. I feel that I have such a long video to watch! I keep planning to get that chunk out of my day, and keep postponing it. I know I am grown-up enough and should not be feeling this, but this is what happens.
This was personal.
But there are factual plus points in favor of smaller chunks:
1. The quizzes at the end of each chunk. The smaller the chunk is, the easier you feel to learn facts and other stuff, the more retention you have before you get the opportunity to face questions and cement a concept.
2. You can very quickly find it later. Rather than having to click through a 100 minute video, you can quickly read the titles of sections on a web-page.
3. When sections are short, the instructor remains focused and to-the-point as well. This is what I want from most instructors. Sure, I would love to hear Yann LeCun blabber about AI for 60 minutes unscripted, but I don't want that from a rando MSFT engineer teaching a tool.
Frankly, I find it very annoying. I watch videos in a nonlinear way already, often jumping backward to earlier topics to review them as I learn the next one. This is made a lot harder when the background for the next topic is not on the same video.
I suspect chopping videos into bite sizes was also done with an eye to making it harder for the user NOT to use proprietary GUI and playback software provided by the video distributor (e.g. Udacity) to navigate all those small videos and quizzes. Curiously, such gateway software has not arisen to control access to MOOCs as yet. (Such software is used extensively by Universities to control access to their instructional materials.)
They are not “videos of lectures” but “lecture videos”.
I do not know exactly what you are referring to, but my students are very happy with that material.
The creator later redid all the videos, cutting them into shorter videos no longer than 9 minutes. He stated the reason was because this was one of the top requests from students.
Different people learn in different ways. For me it's the exact opposite, in longer sessions my brain just shuts off after 15-20 minutes. And this doesn't only apply to videos, so school wasn't particularly fun. I'm glad online content is often more focused.
1. Attention span: most people would not concentrate to study on their own for long hours, they will sneak little chunks whenever they feel like it.
2. Search: you have a single question, you google it, and you find a short video that answers it to the point.
3. Easier to produce: short videos don't need that much post processing and doing it one by one is easier.
Aa for production, they can definitely black out the video for a couple of seconds instead of waiting for 10 seconds to continue. There must be even better ideas but the GCP course has chunks of even 1-2 minutes!
Imagine if this textual information wasn't hidden in a video & the classes were just text. You can find the answers instantly instead of having to scrub through a video of any length, pause, rewind, etc.