An analysis of students’ learning behaviors using variable-speed playback functionality on online educational platforms

The goal of this study is to clarify how students’ learning styles give effects to their learning experience and behaviors while visual contents presented at high speed. In our experiment, participants (10 visual learners and 9 verbal learners) categorized by Felder’s index of learning styles learned information science by watching the video content composed of 6 slides. The participants watched the content on the YouTube and used variable-speed playback functionality: 0.5×; 1.0×; 1.25×: 1.5×; 2.0× and we recorded participants’ behaviors by using video cameras and measured how long they spent using the functionality. We applied ANOVA to the participants’ scores on the comprehension test, mean responses for the questionnaire, and the mean percentage of functionality-usage time duration. The comprehension test results indicated no signify discrepancies between visual learners and verbal learners. Questionnaire survey showed that verbal learners felt significantly less difficulty on the slide 2. The functionality usage time duration indicated that verbal learners spent significantly longer time duration watching the video content at 2.0× speed. Those findings suggest the possibility that verbal learners tend to use the hi-speed playback functionality longer than visual learners when they feel less difficulty on educational slides.