Publicação
Educational videos for pre-school children: challenges in the creation and content distribution in digital platforms
| Resumo: | Digital video streaming platforms such as YouTube allow every agent to upload videos and freely access the available content, representing a democratic and flexible model of audiovisual creation and distribution. Nevertheless, content filtering and recommendation are made by algorithms that select what is statistically most likely to please the user, regardless of the quality of the content (Covington, Adams & Sargin, 2016). Since children often use YouTube autonomously, without adult supervision, they may be exposed to videos that can be inappropriate or inadequate for their development and that do not promote learning (Blumberg, Brooks, Powers & Marcial, 2017). Thus, from the perspective of an audiovisual producer, it is paramount to know how to produce appealing and good-quality educational content from the beginning (Fisch, 2017). Furthermore, as the recommendation system of the algorithms can affect the visibility of content (McKelvey & Hunt, 2019), it is crucial to know the digital behavior and preferences of the target audience to design a complementary distribution strategy. Bearing this in mind, we aim to identify potential challenges that digital platforms pose for creating, producing, and distributing educational videos for preschool children, and to investigate strategies for addressing these challenges from the perspective of the audiovisual producer. This is a topic still little explored in the literature, so this work aims to contribute to the State of the Art in the field of Digital Media. We investigate the challenges and strategies for addressing them in four areas: discourse, design, production, and distribution (the stages of conception of an audiovisual product defined by Kress & Leeuwen, 2001). After identifying the potential challenges in the literature, we investigate how to address them through a literature review and five studies conducted with 186 Portuguese preschool children and 134 families. The results of this work suggest that even though learning from videos is a demanding task for preschool children, using cognitive and pedagogical strategies can enhance their learning outcomes. In addition, engagement with the videos leads to better learning performance. Thus, the producers should focus on edutainment products. The use of editing, alternating closer and wider shots, is not problematic if the characters are centered on the screen. Nonetheless, other editing techniques should be used with caution. Furthermore, local productions should be privileged instead of dubbed content. Finally, producers should make production choices considering that the consumption devices are mainly small and medium screen sizes. To maximize the visibility of the content, producers should focus on building a digital community of viewers, starting from families with preschool children and kindergarten teachers. This work also encompasses an applied research part, in which we demonstrate how we applied the results of our research in the creation of an educational series about music education. We also present a summary of the recommendations for creators and producers of educational audiovisual content for preschool children. |
|---|---|
| Autores principais: | Canelhas, Gisela dos Santos Machado |
| Assunto: | Educational videos for pre-school children Cognitive development and digital media Trends of consumption of education audiovisual contents Digital media and cognition Children and digital media Educational videos Digital media and children Children and YouTube Learning with digital media Education and technology Preschool children Vídeos educativos Media digitais e crianças Crianças e YouTube Aprender com media digitais Educação e tecnologia Crianças em idade pré-escolar |
| Ano: | 2023 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | tese de doutoramento |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade Nova de Lisboa |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | Repositório Institucional da UNL |
| Resumo: | Digital video streaming platforms such as YouTube allow every agent to upload videos and freely access the available content, representing a democratic and flexible model of audiovisual creation and distribution. Nevertheless, content filtering and recommendation are made by algorithms that select what is statistically most likely to please the user, regardless of the quality of the content (Covington, Adams & Sargin, 2016). Since children often use YouTube autonomously, without adult supervision, they may be exposed to videos that can be inappropriate or inadequate for their development and that do not promote learning (Blumberg, Brooks, Powers & Marcial, 2017). Thus, from the perspective of an audiovisual producer, it is paramount to know how to produce appealing and good-quality educational content from the beginning (Fisch, 2017). Furthermore, as the recommendation system of the algorithms can affect the visibility of content (McKelvey & Hunt, 2019), it is crucial to know the digital behavior and preferences of the target audience to design a complementary distribution strategy. Bearing this in mind, we aim to identify potential challenges that digital platforms pose for creating, producing, and distributing educational videos for preschool children, and to investigate strategies for addressing these challenges from the perspective of the audiovisual producer. This is a topic still little explored in the literature, so this work aims to contribute to the State of the Art in the field of Digital Media. We investigate the challenges and strategies for addressing them in four areas: discourse, design, production, and distribution (the stages of conception of an audiovisual product defined by Kress & Leeuwen, 2001). After identifying the potential challenges in the literature, we investigate how to address them through a literature review and five studies conducted with 186 Portuguese preschool children and 134 families. The results of this work suggest that even though learning from videos is a demanding task for preschool children, using cognitive and pedagogical strategies can enhance their learning outcomes. In addition, engagement with the videos leads to better learning performance. Thus, the producers should focus on edutainment products. The use of editing, alternating closer and wider shots, is not problematic if the characters are centered on the screen. Nonetheless, other editing techniques should be used with caution. Furthermore, local productions should be privileged instead of dubbed content. Finally, producers should make production choices considering that the consumption devices are mainly small and medium screen sizes. To maximize the visibility of the content, producers should focus on building a digital community of viewers, starting from families with preschool children and kindergarten teachers. This work also encompasses an applied research part, in which we demonstrate how we applied the results of our research in the creation of an educational series about music education. We also present a summary of the recommendations for creators and producers of educational audiovisual content for preschool children. |
|---|