Animating student engagement: The impacts of cartoon instructional videos on learning experience

In the modern age of education, students increasingly demand engaging, customized multimedia content. Animation constitutes a powerful pedagogical tool by combining audio messages with tailored visual cues and graphics, to serve the dual functions of explaining complex concepts and engaging student interest in the learning process. This study explores the use of a series of animated videos to teach advanced accounting at an Australian university. Based on survey responses from 254 undergraduate students over two semesters, we provide evidence of the specific avenues through which animated instructional videos enhance students’ learning experience, including increased engagement and interest, improved understanding and greater flexibility in self-directed learning. Additionally, character design, voice acting and dialogues in animated videos are found vital to improving student engagement. Further, this study offers novel insights into how students from various demographic groups can derive different benefits from the animations. These findings deepen our existing understanding of the pedagogical advantages of animated instructional videos and offer valuable guidance to enable future educators to harness the power of animation technologies to produce effective teaching resources