Video lectures containing humour improve the engagement and motivation of processing learning content: Insights from...

Video lectures are one of the most popular educational media in an online environment. Despite the documented benefits of adopting humour in traditional educational instruction, few attempts have been made to investigate its effects on learning from video lectures.

The present study aimed to examine the effectiveness of related humour and unrelated humour when learning from video lectures. The expected outcome is to provide a more accurate guidance for the incorporation of humour with the video design for better instructional efficiency.

The present study adopted a within-subjects design, evidenced by both traditional and electroencephalography (EEG) measurements. Twenty-one undergraduate students watched three video lectures teaching different sets of English vocabulary words, providing differing extra information (related humour vs. unrelated humour vs. non-humour) after presenting lexical knowledge. EEGs of participants were assessed while watching learning content (i.e., lexical knowledge). Their self-reported learning experience (engagement and motivation) and learning outcomes were assessed after viewing whole video lectures.

The results revealed whether related or unrelated humour designed in video lectures aroused better engagement and motivation than no humour ones, demonstrated by stronger EEG oscillations in alpha and beta frequencies across most brain regions. Furthermore, related humour was more beneficial to knowledge acquisition compared with no humour, as indicated by improved learning outcomes, whereas the impact of unrelated humour was not obvious. Although there were no differences in the learning outcomes and neural oscillations associated with cognitive processes between the related humour and the unrelated humour conditions, the self-reported learning experience was distinct between these two groups.

We discussed the findings in terms of heuristic value of humour approaches, especially related humour on the instructional design of video lectures.