Knowledge in Images and Sounds: Informative, Narrative and Aesthetic Analysis of the Video for MOOC

The virtual courses developed by higher education institutions incorporate the video format as one of the most used resources in the delivery of their online training offer. Within the different types of audiovisual productions found in MOOCs, the introductory or presentation video of the courses has become an illustrative piece of the new edu-communicative context of distance education, when articulating, in the same work, informative, didactic, and advertising content. The objective of this research work is to study the triple communicative nature of this innovative format following a specific methodology of audiovisual textual analysis. For this, 420 videos of this type of promotional video, belonging to 105 universities and educational centres that have developed MOOC courses for the Miríadax platform, are analysed. After checking the results of the formal characteristics, content structures, discursive techniques, and audiovisual language components of the videos, it is concluded that they are mostly pieces linked to the staging style of the classroom, but that, by enriching the visual appearance of a master lesson with audiovisual resources, take advantage of the narrative, aesthetic, and creative potential of audiovisual and advertising communication to capture the attention of the student-spectator, inform about the characteristics of the courses, offer valuable educational content, and generate an image of the brand for the institution responsible for producing the course.