Open Access

Juan-José Boté Vericad

• This doctoral thesis investigates how users from Higher Education Institutions, including both teachers and students, follow a process of Information Behaviour that encompasses both Information Seeking and Information Searching when consuming educational videos. This project is a mixed methodology research. It follows an exploratory sequential design combined with convergent data. This means that during the final integration of the qualitative and quantitative data, we added YouTube metrics which did not follow any sequence in the research design. These combined data enabled a better understanding of the data from the focus groups, interviews, and questionnaire. The project aims to answer three research questions (RQ). The first research question (RQ1) aimed to determine the reasons for the consumption of educational videos in the learning process, based on a qualitative methodology divided into two parts: focus groups and semi-structured interviews. The qualitative approach begins with focus groups with students in Barcelona (Spain), Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Osijek (Croatia), where we looked for habits and motivations for the consumption of educational videos as an information need. We also looked for information needs patterns among students from different countries in relation to their studies. All students who participated in these focus groups were from the Information Sciences field. Subsequently, we conducted semi-structured interviews. Different actors participated in these semi-structured interviews, including students from different countries such as Costa Rica, Uruguay, or Spain. Our objective was to obtain informative patterns surrounding video consumption, that is, their informative behaviour when searching for educational videos and their behaviour when consuming the selected videos. All the students interviewed were from the Information Sciences field. Secondly, we interviewed teachers, also from the Information Sciences field. Our objective was to observe their motivations both in consuming educational videos, as well as when sharing videos with their respective students. Third, we interviewed YouTube video creators, who identified themselves as teachers or students, including teachers from different countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica or Spain. The creators of videos about Information Sciences are limited. Therefore, the participants in these interviews were from different disciplines. Our goal with these interviews was to discover the motivations behind the publication of educational videos. The second research question (RQ2) addresses the factors that contribute to video consumption by students from different countries. This research question attends to a quantitative approach based on a questionnaire and an analysis of YouTube metrics from different YouTube channels. Once the interviews were completed, we designed a questionnaire to understand consumption patterns based on what was found in the focus groups and semi-structured interviews. The questionnaire was conducted in a number of countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, and Spain and in languages such as Catalan, English, and Spanish, with participants from different disciplines. As the responses in Catalan and English were limited, we only validated the questionnaire in Spanish with a factorial model. Finally, we obtained YouTube metrics from different YouTube channels and compared the metrics with the results of the reporting behaviour from the focus groups, the semi-structured interviews, and the questionnaire. The third research question (RQ3) is about how the results from the qualitative approach help explain the quantitative approach regarding video consumption. This research question addresses the integration of all data sets into a joint visualization based on a pillar integration process. The integration of our results allows for a better understanding of the informational behaviour of users when they search and select videos as part of the learning process within an information landscape. It also provides insight about how an educational video should present the content. The results also enable further research, such as studying the influence of discipline in the consumption of educational videos.