Engaging millennials with online content delivery through a discourse community understanding of learning

Short videos are now a standard feature of online content delivery and a wealth of literature has emerged regarding best practice in designing for student engagement. In this concise paper we argue that lessons from research on engaging with ‘millennial’ students in general can also be applied constructively to video design. In particular this generation of students has been shown to desire a personal connection with their teachers, they expect educators to be ‘passionate’ or ‘enthusiastic’ about the topic, and they demand a line-of-sight connection between the immediate learning activity and the end-goal. Furthermore, we argue that an understanding of transition to university studies which conceives of disciplines as discourse communities provides an integrative understanding of student engagement that further informs the design of effective video vignettes. We describe a set of videos, in which teaching academics describe their research to students in a core first-year Bachelor of Science subject, which have been produced according to the principles derived from the above research and approach, with the aim of attaining a high level of student engagement. These videos have recently been trialled and are soon to be evaluated.