Tutorials for tutorials: Guidelines for creating video tutorials on teaching structural morphology to architecture students

In several fields of studies, audio-visual tutorials have been employed to convey teaching materials to students. Video tutorials significantly contribute to demonstration-based training where the student acquires the knowledge, skills, and attitudes by observing some easy-to-follow examples of performing a task. Although video tutorials are widely used and disseminated nowadays, still little is known about the effectiveness of the produced videos as well as the design characteristics of an effective tutorial. This paper aims to provide guidelines for the creation of software training tutorials. Specific needs and backgrounds of architecture students are considered in preparation of the guidelines. This study begins with describing the theoretical research on the measures that can support students' attention, retention, production, and motivation within a demonstration-based training. Then, three series of open-access, well-known, high-quality instructional videos are selected for evaluation using the measures. These case studies include tutorials for Rhinoceros which is a NURBS modeling CAD software, the tutorials for the DIVA 4.0 plugin for Grasshopper which is used for daylighting analysis, and tutorials on Karamba3D plugin for Grasshopper respectively. The main objective of the evaluations is to highlight the potentials for improvement of these tutorial series and production of similar instructional videos to serve architecture students better. In the end, a series of video tutorials on configuration processing of spatial structures using Grasshopper is introduced.