The instructor presence effect and its moderators in instructional video: A series of meta-analyses

Researchers disagree on the extent to which social cues in instructional videos influence learning and learning-relevant outcomes and processes. The instructor presence effect states that visible instructors in instructional videos lead to increased social presence and higher scores in subjective ratings like motivation, social presence, or affect, but do not improve learning outcomes. In contrast, the Cognitive-Affective-Social Theory of Learning in digital Environments outlines how social cues not only enhance social, emotional, and motivational processes, but they also potentially promote learning outcomes. We conducted a series of meta-analyses to explore the effects of instructor presence in instructional videos on retention, transfer, social presence, motivation, cognitive load, affect, and visual dwell time. The meta-analyses include 35 studies, which contained 46 pair-wise comparisons and 6339 participants. Results revealed a small, statistically significant positive effect of including a visual instructor on retention outcomes, but no significant effect on transfer performance. A visible instructor also significantly enhanced social presence, affective, and motivational ratings. Furthermore, we found that a visible instructor significantly reduced dwell time on relevant visual material but also reduced subjective perception of extraneous cognitive load. Significant moderator effects could be found regarding prior knowledge, the instructional domain as well as the size of the instructor.