Oak National Academy has revealed new findings on how teachers and pupils have used its online lessons, based on research set to be released later this month.

The findings from the online national academy, set up last spring to help with remote learning, were presented at the ResearchEd national conference in London on Saturday, which Tes attended.

Oak’s research, based on 2.5 billion sets of data from 10,000 lessons and 30 million lessons started, derived from anonymous pupil and teacher users, shows that the online academy’s impact depends on pupils’ socioeconomic background.

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And its surveys of 784 teachers, split equally between Oak users and non-users, show that some felt using Oak’s resources had improved their workload and wellbeing.

Oak National leaders said that there was not a wide range of research on online learning out there, and so the academy’s lessons have drawn on broader research exploring good teaching practice.

Oak National Academy: Key findings from its research into online learning

These are six headline findings from Oak’s own research:

1. Video length did not seem to make a difference

A previous study on the impact of the length of videos in general - not specifically those created for online lessons - showed a drop-off in engagement for clips longer than six minutes.

However, Oak’s data showed that the length of videos on its platform had a negligible impact, with only a small drop of around 1 per cent of completion rate for every additional minute of the video.

Reka Budai, research and evaluation manager at Oak National, told an audience at ResearchED: “That was actually a good finding because we were quite worried that we should redesign all of our videos, some of which are longer than 45 minutes.”

2. Oak National lessons are used by three types of teacher

Ms Budai said Oak National has three distinctive types of teacher using its resources. 

She said there are “innovators - they’re the teachers who are really excited about technology and how technology can help their teaching” and, in an ideal world, would want a dashboard showing their pupils’ data.

“Cherry-pickers” are usually at a stage of their careers where they have a range of collected resources at their disposal. “So unless we are providing something distinctive and really high-quality [compared with] the existing resources, they’ll be really hard to get into their library,” she said.

And newcomers - who might be NQTs or teachers delivering a topic or subject outside their specialism - are “the ones who found our videos incredibly helpful, because they could observe the teacher teaching in the video”.

One teacher told Oak National that they played a video on double-speed as part of their morning lesson preparation.

Matt Hood, Oak National’s principal, said 58 per cent of schools had used Oak’s lessons.

He said: “We try to take what a teacher would normally do in their classroom...and we did our best to bring that into what pupils would normally experience in their lessons - somebody stood at the front, asking some questions, somebody explaining things.”

3. Teachers do not see Oak as purely an emergency resource

In February, Oak asked teacher users whether they would still use its resources after the 2020-21 school year, and nearly three-quarters - 74 per cent - said they planned to do so.

Oak also asked these teachers, when they had returned to school in March, how they were using the resources, with 71 per cent reporting they used the online academy for lesson planning.

Three-fifths (60 per cent) were using Oak’s resources within their lessons, while 46 per cent were using them for setting cover work.

4. Oak has improved some teachers’ workloads

“The next finding was that teachers say that Oak has decreased their workload, improved their wellbeing and their teaching,” said Ms Budai.

In Oak’s research, 36 per cent of teachers who used Oak made positive statements about workload, compared with 23 per cent of non-Oak users.

Primary teachers were more likely to say that using Oak’s resources had improved their wellbeing, which Ms Budai said might be because they had to teach more content that they were not specialists in.

And 72 per cent said that Oak’s resources had improved the quality of their remote lesson delivery, while 56 per cent said it had improved their in-class delivery.

Overall, 88 per cent of teachers using Oak said they were satisfied or very satisfied with the learning experience provided. Around a fifth - 22 per cent - said their pupils were exceeding expectations, compared with 16 per cent of non-Oak users.

5. Lesson ‘rhythm’ said to help SEND pupils

Mr Hood said that one of Oak’s “biggest cheerleaders” was the National Autistic Society and that pupils with additional needs were helped by the “regular structure and continuity of the lessons”.

The “rhythm and routine of the lessons really helped to support the most vulnerable pupils”, he said.

Some pupils had used blended online and in-class lessons as they reintegrated back into school.

Oak National was also used by hospital schools and alternative provision, he said.

6. Deprivation affected Oak’s impact

Oak’s data shows that, compared with pupils accessing lessons on a mobile phone, lessons were four times more likely to be completed if accessed via a tablet, and five times more likely on a desktop.

In the most deprived IDACI (Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index) areas, 69.4 per cent accessed lessons by a computer, whereas 78 per cent in the top quintile did.

“Pupils in the most deprived areas are more likely to be accessing on a mobile device, and so when we’re having this national conversation about getting devices to pupils, the thing that we tried to keep hammering home is not all devices are equal,” said Mr Hood.

Mobiles are designed to distract, he said, and games are accessed easily, driving pupils away from “the thing that we’re intending them to learn”.

The skew has narrowed over time, with more deprived pupils accessing lessons through a computer.

Oak targeted support to schools in deprived areas to explore where usage was rising and provided additional CPD for teachers in those areas.

He said getting Oak National zero-rated for data charges, making it free to access from 11 providers, was also helpful in improving access.