YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Snapchat. Vimeo. TikTok. The world is flooded with video and today, we consume over 5 billion videos daily with more than 1 billion of these viewed on mobile devices. Video content certainly is king.
But, this post isn’t about how video content is flooding our devices or even how traditional learning is being overtaken by “Netflix” learning. It’s also not about the differing types of video from animation, whiteboard styles, interactive or even media videos. Rather, it‘s about how we in learning and development can leverage video in learning to further engage our learners, explain complex processes or information and expand our skill sets. According to Forrester Research, employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than read documents, emails or web articles.
Whilst text-based eLearning has its place, and rightly so, let’s take a look at the benefits of using video in eLearning. They provide an alternative medium to those traditional rapid authoring tools which we can leverage to convey our objectives.
They are engaging
Let’s be honest with ourselves here - would we really sit through 20-30 slides of Elearning full of text? If you answered no, then why would we expect our learners to do so? Remember, we are not our users. We must design our learning with our learners in mind. Therefore, they want engaging content. Content which speaks to them, not at them and in ways that they like to learn and see content. Understanding statistics of our video consumption is critical here; YouTube records over 30 million daily active users... that’s a lot of video consumption! From this, we can understand the power of video and how it can be used to for a variety of content matter to convey information from introducing complex ideas, new policies, statistics and reports... the use case is endless!
They break up (boring) content
Aside from just being engaging and being used as a method to inform complex information, they also break up content that may otherwise be boring. If your eLearning course is jam-packed with text slides, it needs to be broken up. Video can help with that. Surprise and delight your learners with content throughout delivered via video. Engage them and have them intrigued to keep learning, not just brainlessly clicking next.
Expand those skill sets
The ability to create video is just another skill set we, as learning designers, need to add to our toolbox of skills. No longer is only being able to use rapid authoring tools okay... for your own professional development or for our learners. Our learners are yearning for a more engaging experience. Video is here, we’re consuming it daily and it’s not going away. We need to build our skill sets to develop video content for our learners. There’s a ton of tools out there which you can leverage to learn and build your skill set - so, get creative, get curious and let’s build our skill sets. Play with tools such as Vyond, Camtasia and even Adobe Creative Cloud. It’s not just for ourselves - it’s for the benefit of our learners.
A concluding thought...
Whilst this post has been all about the benefits of using video within eLearning, one other thing to consider... not all eLearning is born in rapid authoring tools. Video in itself, without a full-blown “course” built in an authoring tool is required - especially if your course is just full of text, voice overs and boring old next buttons. Move beyond this, provide your learners with a video instead of that eLearning course.
