2021 Volume 32 Pages 145-160
This paper describes an exploratory practice that is aimed at developing preferred online educational videos on grammar explanations and reading comprehension techniques for a university-level online English course. Under the conditions caused by COVID-19 in AY 2020, the authors and their team of colleagues have begun operating a large-scale, fully online English class, which had long been based on blended instruction. The new online course is designed to include multiple online tests, web-based training materials, and online videos, with the last occupying almost one third of the lesson time. However, designing and developing online videos, especially based on student preferences, were difficult because of the lack of active feedback. Thus, a rating experiment was conducted, and a conjoint analysis was performed to estimate partial utility and its inter-learner variance for each of the following attributes: (a) text display, (b) visual emphasis, (c) dialog or monologue style, (d) teacher's face display, (e) background music, (f) length of the video, and (g) speech rate. The data from students' rating data (N = 401) clearly showed that text display, visual emphasis, dialog style, and time span are the critical factors influencing preferences of videos. Hence, the online videos were to be developed based on the specifications derived from the analysis.