Swarts Summary

In their article YouTutorial: A Framework for Assessing Instructional Online Video, Matt Morain and Jason Swarts argue that while students come to college as advanced digital users, they struggle with actual digital production. At the same time, technical communication instructors have neither time nor expertise to teach students how to use software applications. Therefore, students often use YouTube instructional videos to fill their learning gaps. But how shall they evaluate the instructional qualities of online videos? Morain and Swarts conducted a survey and developed a rubric to address this problem.

They analyzed the use of sound, video, image, and text in 46 instructional YouTube videos using three research questions. The goal was to understand how these modes contribute to the quality of an instructional video, and provide technical communication students and instructors with an assessment tool to evaluate online video tutorials. Based on the analysis, the authors developed a rubric that assesses online instruction videos based on the extent to which modal forms of content help users access, understand, and follow instructional messages. The rubric evaluates videos as good, average, and poor based on their physical design (accessibility, viewability, and timing of videos), cognitive design (accuracy, completeness, and pertinence), and affective design (confidence, self-efficacy, and engagement).

The authors then tested the rubric on a sample YouTube video. The test showed that the video had the qualities typically rated highly by the YouTube community. It also demonstrated that the video had a particular pattern of physical, cognitive, and affective design characteristics that contributed to its favorable assessment. The authors also identified limitations of the rubric. The data sample being too small (just one video), more videos needed to be analyzed to elaborate the rubric with new observation.

I found the article very interesting and pertinent to my life and work. I use YouTube both for consumer instruction and professional reference. And the article breaks down for me the modal and rhetorical aspects of more successful instructional videos. Plus, while parsing the audio, video, image, and text components of the test video, the authors provided an excellent advice on what it takes to make instructional online videos successful. Therefore, in addition to being a survey report, the article itself is an example of instructional material.