Back in 2022, Maloney and her team set out with a pretty straightforward question: Do those short teacher videos you see in online classes actually get students more engaged, or do they just make it look that way on paper?The instructors recorded 77 videos, uploaded them onto Vimeo, then published them into Moodle, the school's educational platform.Moodle tracked who opened the video, but Vimeo's analytics became finer-grained: who played it, how long, and whether they watched to completion.They didn't just want to count how many times students clicked on a video link--they wanted to know if students were really paying attention, or if the system stats were just painting a rosy picture.They chose seven university courses--nursing, accounting, physics, and so forth.By comparing the two data sets side by side, the group was really able to see the difference between students who were merely attending versus students who were truly engaging.It doesn't require simply creating a bunch of videos.And in all seriousness, the results were very revealing.