Online Classes in ADHD: Holding Attention in Long Videos

A lecture video is playing in one corner of the screen. I am in another tab, inside a resource I opened for the class, and from there on another link, and from there on a page I do not know how I got to.

The video ends. The platform marks it "watched."

I did not watch it.

From the outside, online class looks like a convenience for someone with ADHD: a class at any hour you like, from any place you like, that you can rewind. All of those conveniences are real. But the same flexibility also takes away several invisible things that hold my attention.

The invisible scaffolding of the classroom

In a face-to-face class I did not even notice most of what held my attention. The eyes of the person speaking at the front, the note-taking hand of the person beside me, the class starting and ending at a set hour, the fact that taking out a phone is a little rude. None of these made the class interesting, but all of them kept me in the room.

At home almost all of this scaffolding goes away. A study of 238 adolescents who moved to remote education during the pandemic made this visible for ADHD: adolescents with ADHD had fewer routines and had more difficulty with remote learning. In the ADHD group, fewer routines, increased negative affect and difficulty concentrating went together with difficulty in remote learning (Becker et al., 2020). The study was done with adolescents and in an extraordinary period; it would not be right to carry it directly over to adults. Still, the finding about routines felt very familiar to me.

The mind going off on its own

Watching a video is a passive job. You do not have to answer a question, write something or walk anywhere. In such moments the mind returns to its own business: yesterday's conversation, tomorrow's list, an idea that has just come to mind.

This is called mind wandering and it has two kinds. One you do on purpose: in a boring moment you give yourself permission and think about something else. The other happens without your noticing. A study in two samples totaling 1,354 people found that ADHD symptoms were linked to the second kind, spontaneous mind wandering, and were not linked to the deliberate kind (Seli et al., 2015).

This distinction did me good. Not knowing where I was at the twentieth minute of a forty-minute video did not mean I did not care about the class. The mind was going before I decided anything.

The "watched" mark on a video shows not that I was there but that the time passed.

Putting small quizzes in between

The finding that has helped me most in this area came from Szpunar and colleagues. Participants watched a 21-minute statistics lecture in four segments. One group took a short quiz at the end of each segment; the others either took no quiz or restudied the same content. When asked during the lecture "what is on your mind right now," the group that took quizzes reported that their mind had wandered on 19 percent of the probes; in the other two groups the rates were 39 and 41 percent. Those who took quizzes took more notes, had learned more by the end and reported less anxiety about the final test (Szpunar et al., 2013).

The participants did not have ADHD. But the logic of the method touches directly on the place where ADHD struggles: it turns passive watching into an active task every few minutes. Knowing that "I am about to be asked a question" becomes a small anchor for attention.

Video length and speed

Long videos are a problem for most people. A study examining 6.9 million video-watching sessions on the edX platform showed that short videos held viewers' interest much better; the authors' recommendation was to keep videos under six minutes (Guo et al., 2014). I cannot shorten a forty-minute recording, but I can split it.

On speed there is an honest finding too. In participants who watched a lecture video at different speeds, the cost to comprehension of 1.5 and 2 times speed was small; above 2 times, performance began to fall (Murphy et al., 2022). It was not tested in a sample with ADHD. My own experience points in this direction: when the speed goes up a little, it becomes harder for my mind to find a gap to leave through, as if the arousal level moves a little closer to the workable range. I see this not as a rule but as a setting worth trying.

Being invisible in a live online class

Unlike recorded videos, live online classes have a difficulty of their own: the camera can be off.

When the camera is off, no one sees me. At first this feels like a relief; no one notices my face getting bored or my eyes drifting elsewhere. But the same invisibility takes something else away. One of the things that pulled me together in class was knowing that I was visible. Once invisible, there is no outside reason left to pull myself together.

With the camera on, a different burden comes: seeing my own face on the screen. Checking how I look is a small job that takes a share away from listening. So the middle path worth trying for me became keeping the camera on and hiding my own image. I know I am visible but I am not watching myself.

The chat box cuts both ways too. Writing a question can keep my attention in the class; when I start following other participants' messages, the class falls into the background. Opening the chat to write and closing it to read is a small but useful separation.

Should every class be watched as a video

Sometimes the best solution is not to start with the video. If there is a written version of the same content, a slide file or class notes, skimming that first makes my job easier. When I know what is going to be covered, the video stops being a discovery and becomes a confirmation, and I notice the moments when my mind drifts more easily. This is not possible in every class. But when it is, I know in advance which parts of the video I need to look at carefully.

The online class routine I built for myself

What I describe here is my attempt to adapt the logic of the research to my own habits.

I write a single question before starting. "What should I be able to explain after this video?" One sentence. What I am looking for while watching becomes clear.

I split the video myself. Every 8-10 minutes I pause, shrink the screen and write three sentences: what was covered, what I did not understand, what I am curious about. It is the do-it-yourself version of the quiz put in between. Note-taking has a difficulty of its own; I wrote about it separately in the article taking notes in ADHD.

Full screen, a single tab. When the video is full screen, switching to another tab is one more click away. A small friction, but it works. The rest of the digital side is in the article digital clutter.

I keep the speed between 1.25 and 1.5. Slower if the subject is new and dense, faster if it is review.

Same time, same place. Watching even a recorded class at the same time of the week at the same desk partly takes the place of the lost class schedule. Once the start time is fixed, the decision of "when should I watch" disappears, and for me that decision is sometimes more tiring than the watching itself.

Someone with a camera on. Quietly working in a video call with someone taking the same class, or with a friend who is doing something entirely different, brings back some of the classroom's lost scaffolding. Details in the article body doubling.

The recording is always there. The thought "it's recorded anyway" is the sweetest trap of online class. The accumulated videos turn after a while into a mountain that needs to be watched, and the size of the mountain makes starting even harder. Putting a recorded class into the calendar at a fixed time as if it were a live class is the simplest way to prevent this buildup.

Five minutes when it ends

When the video ends, it is tempting to move straight to the next one; the platform starts the next one by itself anyway. I try to stop that transition. I set aside five minutes and go back to the single question I wrote at the start: what can I explain after this video? If I can write the answer in a few sentences, the video has done its job. If I cannot, instead of moving on to the next video I find the part I missed.

Turning off autoplay of the next video is the easiest way to protect these five minutes. Otherwise one video starts before the other has finished, and at the end of the evening I have watched three videos and fully understood none. These five minutes look boring; still, they leave me something to hold on to when I begin the next class.

Online class taught me something else too. I used to think that what held my attention for a long time was the subject itself. In fact the environment was doing an important part of the work. When the environment goes, it has to be rebuilt in small pieces.