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We created a series of videos for an online introductory astronomy course at the Pennsylvania State University in part to address the lack of personal presence in online courses. Based on surveys administered to the students during the semester, we found that these videos were effective in creating an instructor presence within the online course. We also found that students who perceived a strong instructor presence had a more positive attitude toward the course. Additionally, there is a correlation between the students' perceptions of how helpful a video is with how enjoyable they rated it, but no correlation between the perceived helpfulness of a video and student performance on video-specific questions, suggesting that students are not good at assessing video helpfulness. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)

We present the effect of video demonstrations on student performance in an online Astronomy course. We find that students who watched the videos performed better on related exam questions compared to those who did not watch the videos. We also find that students in the online course performed as well as students in a nearly identical face-to-face course on video-related questions but worse on other questions. Finally, we find that online students performed at par with face-to-face students on the Astronomy Diagnostic Test. These videos are freely available on YouTube, Google Videos, and iTunes. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)