The Effects of Video Lecture Design on Learners in Online Learning: A Systematic Review

Video lectures are indispensable components of current online learning platforms. They play critical roles in shaping learners’ responses and learning performance. This research intends to synthesize the findings relevant to the effects of video lecture design on learners in online learning. It identified the key elements of video lecture design and revealed their impacts on learners’ responses and learning performance by conducting a systematic review. Based on 73 peer-reviewed journal papers extracted and selected from the Web of Science (WOS) core collections database, this research illustrated the landscape of the literature by publication year, journal source, citations, and keyword co-occurrence. It also identified three themes in the literature, such as instructor presence, instructor characteristics, and content presentation, and summarized the key findings for each theme. This research contributes to the online learning literature by revealing the current status of scholarly works relevant to video lecture design and proposes an agenda for future research in this emerging field. Meanwhile, it offers practitioners the synthesized findings in the academic investigations on video lecture design in online learning.