Does Dynamically Drawn Text Improve Learning? Investigating the Effect of Text Presentation Styles in Video Learning

Dynamically drawn content (e.g., handwritten text) in learning videos is believed to improve users’ engagement and learning over static powerpoint-based ones. However, evidence from existing literature is inconclusive. With the emergence of Optical Head-Mounted Displays (OHMDs), recent work has shown that video learning can be adapted for on-the-go scenarios. To better understand the role of dynamic drawing, we decoupled dynamically drawn text into two factors (font style and motion of appearance) and studied their impact on learning performance under two usage scenarios (while seated with desktop and walking with OHMD). We found that although letter-traced text was more engaging for some users, most preferred learning with typeface text that displayed the entire word at once and achieved better recall (46.7% higher), regardless of the usage scenarios. Insights learned from the studies can better inform designers on how to present text in videos for ubiquitous access.