Education

Building Business Understanding Through Video-Based Learning

Ellen Ovenden, MSc | Oct 17, 2025

Ellen Ovenden, MSc | Oct 17 2025

Within 24 hours, the average adult forgets nearly 70% of new information.¹ For business students, that means many of the core ideas taught in lectures are quickly lost. They learn how transactions move through accounts, how markets react to policy, and how data informs decisions, but often only in theory.

Textbooks explain the concepts, yet they rarely help students see how those ideas work in practice. In many classrooms, that gap between reading and understanding is where learning stalls. Visual learning through video helps close it by turning abstract concepts into something students can observe, replay, and remember.

Making Accounting Make Sense

Accounting is sometimes called the language of business, yet its rules can feel abstract to beginners. Students may memorize terms like “debit” and “credit,” but struggle to see how each transaction connects to the bigger financial picture.

💡 In action: In one class, a lecturer plays a short video on the double-entry system while walking students through an example purchase. The video animates each movement across accounts, showing exactly how assets, liabilities, and equity stay in balance.

When the transaction appears on the screen, the instructor pauses and asks: What would happen if this purchase were made on credit instead?

Students discuss, rewatch the relevant moment, and adjust their notes to reflect the new scenario. By watching the chain of entries unfold, they begin to grasp the logic behind every debit and credit—not as isolated steps, but as a process that mirrors real business activity.

Seeing the Economy in Motion

Macroeconomics introduces another challenge: scale.

When learners study GDP or national income, they are trying to picture the movement of money and resources across an entire economy. Static diagrams rarely capture how these flows interact in real time.

💡 In action: In a seminar on economic performance, students watch an animation on the circular flow of income between households, firms, the government, and international markets. As the video progresses, students watch spending, taxes, and trade move through the system like currents in a network.

The instructor pauses the clip and asks: What would happen if government spending increased or exports declined? Students discuss, replay the relevant moments, and trace how these changes affect overall income and output.

By visualizing the entire economy as a living system of flows, learners begin to see how small shifts in one sector can influence growth, stability, and global connections.

Encouraging Active Learning

Video supports more than explanation—it encourages participation. Faculty can add short quizzes after each segment to help students check understanding, or ask them to pause and predict what happens next in a scenario. Studies show that these small interactive moments increase engagement and knowledge retention.²

Because students can rewind and replay difficult sections, they gain control over their learning pace. This flexibility is especially valuable in large or mixed-level courses, where background knowledge varies.

Why Visual Teaching Works for Business

📌 Dynamic systems: Business and economics involve moving parts: transactions, policies, market shifts. Animation can show these changes in sequence, helping learners see cause and effect.
📌 Connection to practice: Videos can include realistic business cases, showing how abstract models guide decisions.
📌 Decision clarity: By illustrating outcomes of strategic choices, visuals help learners understand trade-offs, risks, and feedback loops that written examples often oversimplify.
📌 Visual data interpretation: Finance and economics rely on charts, ratios, and indicators. Video and animation make these quantitative relationships tangible, showing how changes in variables shape performance.

By combining these features, video learning turns theory into something visible, structured, and memorable.

Clarity That Builds Confidence

When students can visualize how concepts fit together, they approach analysis and decision-making with more confidence. In Accounting, they see how each entry links to performance and compliance. In Macroeconomics, they understand how policies ripple through economies.

Both subjects are new additions to JoVE’s Business collection, designed to help faculty build clarity in the classroom—supporting stronger discussions, more independent learners, and more time to focus on application rather than explanation.

Show students how business principles drive real-world decisions.
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Murre, J. M. J., & Dros, J. (2015). Replication and analysis of Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve. PLOS ONE, 10(7), e0120644. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0120644
Brame, C. J. (2016). Effective educational videos: Principles and guidelines for students and teachers. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 15(4), es6. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-03-0125