3-5 minutes of quality, concise content: Here’s why short bursts of audio-visual learning are perfect for plugging knowledge gaps.

With so many exams squeezed into a narrow window between May and June, the modern GCSE student must be organised if he or she wants to leave enough time to revise for each subject.

To handle such tight time restrictions, pupils need a GCSE revision resource that breaks down topics into manageable chunks and allows them to gather the most important bits of information in a short burst to close knowledge gaps.

GCSEPod’s simply delivered short bursts of content offer the ideal solution to today’s students. Our Pods provide essential topic knowledge written by specialist teachers. This means that key GCSE resources can be accessed anytime and anywhere via mobile devices.  Users can dip in and out of our videos as they revise, accessing the most important nuggets of information at will.

Images, keywords and audio combine to embed knowledge and give students the opportunity to grasp topics quickly and effectively. In the most recent examination window, GCSEPod’s usage statistics have shown just how important our platform can be as a last-minute recap tool before an examination. For example, we logged more than 170,000 Pod views in the 24 hours leading up to this year’s English Literature exam.

The way students consume content today is very different from the way they read, watched and listened in generations gone by. Children are spending more time online than ever before and, with so much to see and do on the Internet, they constantly jump from site to site, article to article and video to video.

Statistically, people are checking social media and news sites more frequently throughout the course of the day. Yet they also flit between sites more regularly and stick to individual websites for shorter periods of time. This habit is known as “news snacking” and it has had a profound effect on how teenagers also choose to study.

While research has shown that attention spans appear to be dropping across the age ranges, it is also believed that today’s Internet users have an improved ability to multitask and display “more intermittent bursts of high attention”. According to one piece of research carried out by Microsoft, it was found that people are now “better at identifying what they want/don’t want to engage with and need less to process and commit things to memory.”

However, our viewer retention figures show that students aren’t just skimming over the content; they watch 64% of each Pod streamed on average. This figure is even more impressive when we consider that 75% of Pods are viewed beyond the school gates.

Of course, GCSEPod is also a fantastic online learning tool for students over the course of the entire school year. The simply delivered, concise content works particularly well when applied in a flipped learning environment or as the starting point for a homework assignment.

Teachers can set students the task of watching a Pod ahead of a lesson, enabling them to familiarise themselves with subject matter at their own pace. The classroom environment then becomes a place to develop a deeper understanding of topics through discussions and hands-on activities.

Click on the Flipped Learning poster below to save and download it.

Could your students benefit from additional GCSE revision resources next year?