Though perhaps a fairly obvious piece of advice, it’s important to give your videos appropriate and descriptive titles in order to help students quickly and easily find what they are looking for.
In their 2014 study on videos in MOOCs Kim and colleagues reference a tip from YouTube’s Creator Academy that says a sharp drop off at the very beginning of a video could mean that what viewers found wasn’t what they expected (YouTube, n.d.). Remember that students will want to review your videos when studying for final exams or completing their assignments. Most learning management systems don’t have sophisticated search functions, and unless there are transcripts, video content is nearly impossible to search without scrubbing through manually. Naming videos carefully can help students find what they are looking for easily, reducing feelings of frustration that may decrease persistence and engagement.
Kim, J., Guo, P. J., Seaton, D. T., Mitros, P., Gajos, K. Z., & Miller, R. C. (2014). Understanding in-video dropouts and interaction peaks in online lecture videos. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning@ scale conference (pp. 31-40). https://doi.org/10.1145/2556325.2566237
YouTube. (n.d.). How engaged is my audience? Creator Academy. Retrieved April 11, 2020, from https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/lesson/engagement-analytics?cid=analytics-series&hl=en#strategies-zippy-link-1