Pushing the Button: Study Reveals Importance of Pause Button for the Comprehension of Educational Videos

How do you calculate the oxygen content of water? How does the European Union work? These and many other questions are addressed in countless videos on various internet platforms, the most prominent of which is YouTube. But how do people actually use these educational videos? In the context of an interdisciplinary research project, scientists at the Leibniz Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM), the German Institute for Adult Education (DIE) and the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology have now gained first insights into when and why users of online video platforms push the pause button. “This essentially depends on two factors,“ explains IWM researcher Prof. Dr. Markus Huff. The head of the IWM’s Knowledge Exchange lab notes that “a frequent use of the pause button can be observed at particularly complicated passages and between different content sequences in the videos.” In contrast, the formal video structure, such as edits and graphic design elements on the video platform, did not affect viewing behaviour.

The study findings can not only be incorporated into the conceptional design of educational videos. Moreover, for their study, the researchers relied on anonymised usage data from real applications and not on data from controlled experimental settings in order to obtain the most authentic picture of viewing behaviour possible. In the future, this approach can help shed light on further questions concerning the natural viewing behaviour of users.

You can find further information in our press release.