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Many massive open online courses (MOOCs) have emerged on the World Wide Web. MOOCs bring disruptive changes to the process of learning and teaching. With high-speed Internet connection becoming ubiquitous and with the advancement of video compression techniques, the primary multimedia format in learning and teaching in these MOOC environments is video, streamed in a web browser.
Watching lecture videos in a MOOC provides greater accessibility than the traditional classroom and time convenience for learners. However, there are several problems faced by learners when watching long lecture videos: high cognitive load caused by information overload faced by learners, especially for persons with low working memory capacity, and high dropout rates caused by misleading titles, course navigation structure, and longer video duration, which makes students feel bored due to short attention spans or experiencing more interruption (Kim et al., 2014).
A study by Chi et al. (2017) found that college students who observed dialogue between a tutor and a tutee have better learning gains with the tutee students at answering transfer-type questions which implies that they can learn as well as the tutees in the dialogue videos. The study showed that a tutee in the video plays an essential role in the video and, from the observer student’s point of view, the tutee becomes a role model for them. Even though the dialogue-style video is proven to have more benefits to learning than monologue-style videos, the majority of lecture videos provided in MOOCs, Open Courseware, and also popular video sharing platforms such as YouTube are delivered in monologue style where one lecture/tutor presents learning material. A past study also found that most MOOCs use recorded video lectures (Hew & Cheung, 2014).
A recent study investigating the effect of a dialogue-style video lecture versus a monologue-style video lecture on a programming topic also found no differences in the students’ learning performance and attention (Lee & Muldner, 2020). We saw this as an opportunity to enhance the existing monologue video into a dialogue-like video by adding a synthetic agent. The agent can act as a tutee which ignites a dialogue with the tutor or the lecturer in the monologue video. To add the synthetic or the tutee agent inside an existing video lecture, we developed an online tool that enables a course designer to transform an existing monologue video into a dialogue-like video so it could gain the same benefits as the dialogue video. To evaluate how our dialogue-like style video affects student learning performance and their perception, we experimented by comparing it to two other traditional video styles, the monologue and dialogue style.
In this paper, we present our study with the following structure. First, we discuss previous studies on learning from a dialogue video, pedagogical agents, and the effects of learning with a pedagogical agent. We started with the dialogue video which has its root in vicarious learning. Second, we describe the study’s purpose, our research questions, and the methodology we used to evaluate the dialogue-like video. Third, we present the results of our quantitative and qualitative data analysis. Fourth, we discuss the results in detail and how they answer our research questions. Finally, we conclude this paper by presenting our study’s limitations and the improvements that can be made for future research. The contributions of our study include:
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Evidence of the comparable learning effect between a traditional dialogue video and a dialogue-like video with a pedagogical agent.
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Evidence of student preference and their opinion in regard to their learning experience with a dialogue, a dialogue-like, and a monologue video lecture.