Online Adult Learners' Perceptions of Usefulness in Career-Focused Instructional Videos

Online videos are becoming more common with university synchronous and asynchronous learning approaches. As universities begin to extend their use of online instructional videos, greater emphasis needs to be placed on establishing relevance between the video’s instructional content and its application/transfer to workplace settings. In response to this need, a relevance intervention was designed, whereby a series of career-focused (C-F) videos featuring practitioner faculty were created and added to an undergraduate Health Administration course. The research questions guiding this study were: (a) How do online adult learners perceive the usefulness of career-focused videos and what video features contribute to those perceptions? and (b) What is the relationship between online adult learners’ perceptions of usefulness in career-focused videos, satisfaction with the career-focused video approach, and overall course satisfaction? Data were triangulated using end-of-video surveys (n = 125), an end-of-course survey (n = 99), and student interviews (n = 4). Data revealed that after being exposed to bi-weekly C-F videos, students reported strong positive perception of usefulness in the C-F videos and identified authenticity, contextualized examples, relevance, and knowledge checks as useful videos elements to support their learning. Correlation results between perceptions of usefulness, perceptions of satisfaction in the C-F video approach, and overall course satisfaction suggested a strong positive association between the three variables, thus indicating that C-F videos could prove to be a useful method for supporting the education to career connection among online adult learners.