Video in Digital Education: What Does the Research Actually Say?

Every day, millions of students interact with digital learning platforms. Too many of these experiences prioritize attention over learning, clicks over comprehension, and entertainment over education. At Edmentum, we've built our reputation on refusing these false choices. Our learning design principles prove that rigorous, research-backed instruction can be both effective and engaging—a commitment to quality that has earned us Digital Promise's Research-Based Design certification for meeting rigorous research standards without sacrificing educational integrity for entertainment value.

Student Engagement and Digital Learning

While streaming platforms like Netflix and social media sites like TikTok and YouTube encourage binge watching, there can be downsides to structuring a digital education curriculum through a video-first lens. Platforms designed to trap viewers’ attention prioritize continuous watching and more clicks; retention of knowledge is not their goal. These platforms play to quantity-over-quality, leading Netflix itself to admit that quality suffered as they structured their business to churn out quantity. 

If you’ve used any of these platforms, you know the experience: you have to sort through lots of noise and subpar content before you find the quality entertainment or information you truly appreciate. You may also have experienced the sense that each new movie, show, or short video feels just like the last. We can spend hours binge-watching or scrolling through content, but come away with no tangible, memorable experience. This happens because, as the authors of Brain Wash note: 

“Technology can disconnect us from our high-level brains by promoting mindless activity. Our ability to be thoughtful, focused, and present gets squandered when we turn our attention to clickbait, an endless scroll of newsfeeds, or an unbroken video queue. When we finally step out of the nearly unconscious state in which we pursue these activities, we realize how much time has vanished and how little we have to show for it—certainly nothing productive. Our brains might as well have been hibernating.” (p. 59)

Attention Is Not the Same as Learning

While bad enough that these practices have been changing our media landscape, we find it particularly worrisome when education companies say they want to create products as bingeable as popular Netflix series or “engaging” as an influencer’s TikTok feed. At Edmentum, we refuse to compromise on educational quality, and we certainly don’t want students’ brains to “hibernate,” when they should have experiences and environments designed for active learning. Quality is essential to us, and engagement means more than attention. It requires research-based design to ensure learning that sticks. 

We build products that get recognized as best-in-class education. Their impact is demonstrated by rigorous research on the student outcomes that matter, including attendance and NWEA MAP Growth scores. As an Educator First company, we invest in the most talented teachers and development teams with education and learning sciences expertise, not cinematographers, to design research-driven solutions to ignite student potential. We also partner with schools to support successful implementations so that students build healthy connections to the educators around them, enhancing learners’ motivation. This article offers some real talk about the role videos play in the design of research-based digital education products that provide quality learning experiences for all students. 

What Does the Research Say About Video in Student Learning? 

Videos have been touted as the way to catch students’ attention in today’s world, thus the earlier Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok comparisons. Research does support specific uses of video to enhance learning, but with clear implications for quality and planning for engagement. These researchers argue that “videos produced with a more personal feel could be more engaging than high-fidelity studio recordings,” and recommend: “try filming in an informal setting; it might not be necessary to invest in big-budget studio productions” (p. 2).

While it may be true that we all spend more time on our devices consuming video and using online videos as resources for quick learning or problem-solving, it is not clear that these popular and available videos alone produce the best results for learning and retention. One of the key findings from the whitepaper Assessing the Impact of Educational Video on Student Engagement, Critical thinking and Learning: The Current State of Play acknowledges that “very little is known about video’s role in knowledge development and helping critical thinking, and this is identified as a major gap in the research that requires more investigation” (p. 5).

When (and How) Is Video Effective for Learning?

To this point, research has found interactive videos to be “at least comparable to that of print” when it comes to effectiveness for learning—indicating that video can be effective, but that the purposeful use, not the medium, is the answer in teaching and learning. For example, videos can explain concepts in engaging ways, and they are especially useful in helping students gain access to events, time periods, and phenomena that they cannot experience in their lives or classrooms. For these reasons, we purposefully use video in our products and partner with innovative organizations that are doing so effectively. 

Roadtrip Nation is one of those partners, and their work embodies exactly what that research says about personal feel beating studio polish. For more than two decades, the Emmy-winning team has sent students across the country in their iconic green RVs to interview real professionals about how they actually got where they are, including the detours, the setbacks, and the moments things clicked. We've curated 200 of these bite-sized career interviews and aligned them to core high school courses, so the stories show up where they're relevant rather than in a career-exploration silo.

In Algebra I, for example, before students solve a single equation, they meet Diana Trujillo Pomerantz. In under three minutes, she traces her path from student to leading a NASA team that drives a robot on Mars.

That's an answer to "when am I ever going to use this?" built into the course itself. Students see how the class in front of them connects to careers they may not have known existed, and that connection drives authentic engagement, and exactly the kind of purposeful use of video the research supports.

How Video in Digital Curriculum Supports Learning

Video can help explain complex concepts, guide student learning, and strategically increase engagement. We use video to:  

• Reduce the cognitive load on learners with multimodal explanations.
• Animate intangible, abstract, or hard-to-see phenomena, like DNA, weather, chemical reactions, etc.
• Illustrate the use of manipulatives in problem solving.
• Simulate hands-on experiences in the virtual realm.
• Share authentic stories from diverse voices.
• Model steps in a process.
• Summarize and recap what students have learned.

Using Video to Meet the Needs of All Students 

While videos are indeed a powerful tool for learning when used in the context of research-driven strategies, they are not the answer for every student nor every lesson. At Edmentum, we design for the millions of students in classrooms around the globe who learn with our products. To consider the needs of such a diverse student population, we look to research on learner variability, defined by Digital Promise as “the recognition that each student has a unique set of strengths and challenges across a whole learner framework that are interconnected and vary according to context.” Our curriculum must use multiple strategies to support students’ success, just as our educators and instructional designers must think beyond what works for themselves as learners.

We create targeted and personalized learning for intervention and acceleration, not just clickbait. Therefore, each component of our instruction, whether video, narrative, graphic organizer, guided notes, activities, or assessments, leverages innovative design to give a variety of learners an opportunity to thrive. We catch students’ attention through productive learner engagement, defined by active, not passive, interaction with learning across these dimensions of engagement: behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and agentic. 

Designing Educational Videos for Learning

Finally, we know that when we use video, we need to keep in mind the following considerations. 

• Quality Control: We realize that finding high-quality educational videos can be challenging. We design our videos thoughtfully, using multiple strategies to elevate learning and very carefully source what we don’t create ourselves.
• Overreliance: We know that relying solely on videos may limit active learning, so we use them as a strategic tool and in conjunction with multiple strategies for productive engagement.
• Attention Span: We understand the research about what video lengths have the highest impact to increase retention and create success on assessments. We work to balance brevity with conveying content depth.
• Efficacy: We acknowledge that attributing learning outcomes to videos can be tricky. We will continue to monitor the learning science, design our products accordingly, and conduct research studies to evaluate the impact of our programs on outcomes that matter. 

At Edmentum, we know that when you pair our comprehensive, research-backed learning acceleration solutions with empowered and supported educators, you can change the direction of students’ lives. Creating such impact means following the science to inform thoughtful instructional design that utilizes all the tools available to productively engage learners. Video will remain one of our tools, not our solution, for producing quality education products.

Change Student Outcomes with High-Quality Digital Curriculum

Edmentum Courseware consistently wins top industry recognitions as the leading courses and courseware solution. With more than 500 courses, including a comprehensive CTE library offering more than 180 semesters and nearly 60 career pathways, Courseware gives all students grades 6-12 access to the classes they need. 

Courseware is built on key learning design principles and backed by ESSA Tier II efficacy research, demonstrating real impact for real students like yours. Learn more today.