Students' Preferences between Traditional and Video Lectures: Profiles and Study Success

Videos play a key role in modern education. Although the impact and design of video material are relatively well understood, individual differences and patterns, especially in the context of computing education, in video utilization are not. In this work, we study how students attend live lectures and watch video lectures in a data structures and algorithms course. Students had the option to attend the live lectures, watch the lectures as videos, or both. We cluster data related to live lecture attendance and video watching collected over multiple years and find three distinct profiles: 1) active students who prefer lectures, 2) active students who prefer videos and 3) those who provide only limited attention toward online or video lectures. Whereas previous research suggests that watching video lectures is related to at least equal performance when compared to attending live lectures, we found that (in our context) students attending live lectures outperformed all the other groups. This may be related to a selection bias in our setup, however. Thus, the use of video lectures as a part of versatile study material in computing education needs more attention in the future.