FocusOn Learning Video

Technology continues to advance rapidly, changing how people live and interact with the world around them. Today’s learning professionals face the challenge of staying ahead of this curve and tracking the technologies that are shaping the future of organizational learning, while at the same time recognizing technologies that may be more of a passing fad.

Video technology is ubiquitous. However, many professionals become so preoccupied with whether they CAN produce a video that they often don’t stop to think about whether they SHOULD. Too often, this results in the development of ineffective content that doesn’t support user needs, wastes viewers’ time, and sets a poor precedent for the use of video within the organization.

Microlearning is a way to solve the problems facing L&D today: dwindling attention spans, shrinking budgets, knowledge workers with less time, and perhaps most challenging, the rapid evolution of technology that outdates skills as soon as they’re learned.

Interviewing is a common way to gather information and a widely used approach in learning and development, HR, and marketing research. Capturing this information on video for analysis and reuse is a good way to extend the life of captured content. However, many people don’t know what makes one interview more effective than another in what they capture and the questions being asked.

Learning organizations jump feet first into emerging trends without the right people, in the right seats, on the bus. The result of this approach is waste. Video production requirements go beyond the basic understanding of consumer electronics and, within the intersection of learning and development, can result in a considerable learning curve for quality production outcomes.

Subject matter experts (SMEs) have expert knowledge to share. For rapid development situations or just-in-time training, SMEs can contribute good, solid content videos that can be shared with learners—and they can create the videos when they have the time or when a situation arises that would be a great video example, such as demonstrating a process or recalling a dangerous situation.

Practice makes perfect. Few would argue with that statement, but how do you provide enough time for ongoing practice and meaningful feedback with time-crunched employees?

The use of online video has become an essential part of teaching and learning. At the same time, it is challenging to provide accessible video accommodations for audiences across platforms and languages. Google thinks that all video material should be universally accessible—why not caption?

Two of the most popular technologies used to engage learners today are video and mobile. Videos are becoming increasingly interactive, even on mobile devices, but developing these videos can be complex. Where does an organization start?

There is a lot of mediocre training out there. This can be attributed to a shortage of time and money available to corporate training departments. Many of the DIY development tools currently in use yield passive learning experiences that are not engaging and do not require critical thinking or problem-solving skills. We are out to change that by using game-based technologies to improve engagement and produce measurable results.

The convergence of mobile delivery, micro-learning, and new authoring tools provides great opportunities to innovate where limited time and budget are available. Much mobile-delivered micro-learning focuses on spaced repetition and memorization. Micro-sims go beyond knowledge and comprehension and require learners to synthesize and apply concepts in realistic contexts.

L&D is vital to the continued growth of any organization, but how do you develop relevant content that your employees can relate to? And how do you keep your employees engaged and involved in the process of learning?

Online video-based instruction can be just as ineffective as traditional face-to-face lectures when learners are passive recipients of information. The “testing effect” describes the observation that the process of remembering concepts or facts increases long-term retention of those concepts or facts. The creation of question-embedded videos offers a practical way to increase user engagement and increase long-term retention.

We all know that video is an incredibly effective learning method. Learners can remember up to six times more from trainings and classes that incorporate videos than they do from those that don’t. Many trainers, however, are not sure how to most effectively use videos; simply showing clips is not the best method. In fact, it’s a missed opportunity!

Well-rounded eLearning courses leverage multiple elements to enhance learning.  These may include video, audio, activities, text, and images. How do you ultimately know whether these elements, in particular the complex activities and videos you crafted, are in fact enhancing understanding? How can you better determine whether there is a relationship between the activities and end-user performance?

Screencasts can be a powerful tool for eLearning developers. Well-produced screencasts can be great for software simulation, process demonstration, or providing background and context within an eLearning course. Screencasts are relatively easy and cheap to produce. However, poorly produced screencasts can be, at best, boring—and, at worst, injurious to your learning goals. While many take the idea of screencasts for granted, there are a number of techniques that can improve screencast quality and engage learners more deeply and for longer periods of time.

Video is eating the Internet. We’re consuming and creating more of it than ever, and 64 percent of consumers identify as binge watchers. But these trends don’t just apply to entertainment content—they’re having a huge impact on learning, and learners’ expectations, too.

Learning practitioners strive to understand the real-life environment of experts as much as possible. But getting access to really see how people do their jobs when they are in a more technical or hands-on role (e.g., construction, refinery, or factory work) is difficult. Often, learning practitioners can’t use video or real-life images because of safety or clearance constraints. This poses a challenge as they try to create impactful learning materials.

In the 21^st century, it’s increasingly challenging to keep people engaged in content. Today’s learning professionals must employ new technologies to influence and change attitudes and behavior. Interactive video is one of those technology solutions that the market is gravitating toward, and for good reason. However, there are many different solutions out there, and not all are created equal. When instructional designers and eLearning professionals are selecting technology for their programs, where should they begin?

Text expansion is an inherent challenge with localizing any content. Accommodating the additional scripts or subtitles poses different technical and content challenges than do traditional eLearning courses developed using authoring tools.

Increasingly, companies must use innovate ways to add to the bottom line. Unlike previous disrupters in mobile and eLearning, Gear VR, powered by Oculus, takes video experiences to the next level. Where does virtual reality fit into an organizational learning strategy? How does an organization effectively move forward to maximize its capability?

Performance on leadership development competencies, like coaching, influencing, and speaking skills, has an ineffable quality difficult to capture in words. If you want to explain what’s great and what to work on while evaluating participants, you or they will miss something in the translation from behavior to observation to words on a page.

Concise visual metaphors facilitate the best learning. Think back to high school, college, or a meeting where you experienced that “aha” moment while someone was drawing on a whiteboard. How can you reproduce this learning experience online with a small budget and without an art degree? Whiteboard-style recordings can be just as effective as the fancy Flash or HTML5 videos you might produce with more expensive software.

Video is the go-to medium in society, and it can be a valuable tool for delivering performance support and training. Most companies are searching for metrics to evaluate the impact of learning content produced, including videos, and asking learning teams to demonstrate ROI: Does their content produce measurable benefits? Which design techniques result in the best content? Without being able to successfully leverage analytics, learning teams cannot answer.

For trainers or educators who need to stay relevant and maintain their creative edge, a fundamental knowledge of basic video production and editing is essential. Creating effective, professional-quality video training for delivery on multiple devices, including smartphones and tablets, presents a variety of design challenges that require specialized planning with attention to image composition, duration, script writing, recording methods, and editing techniques.

Finding ways to make learning “stick” with technology is always a challenge. Augmented reality (AR) is one of those “make it stick” technologies. With AR, you enable students to interact with the world using their mobile devices. This can improve their understanding of lessons through direct interaction with the objects around them. Now add video to AR projects, and you’ve combined a popular medium of instruction with cutting-edge tech.

Capturing intellectual property has become imperative as more employees job hop or retire, taking the company “secret sauce” with them. L&D pros need to adopt efficiencies for SME video interviews in order to leverage their wisdom for state-of-the-art knowledge transfer.

When they go right, video projects can go incredibly right! But when they go wrong, they can go very, very wrong. The stakes are higher with eLearning in video form because of the costs, expectations, and limitations in making updates to content.

When hiring entry-level employees who need to be able to start work immediately, you need to ensure they have the skills required to complete the job. It isn’t always practical to have a manager supervising them through each step of their job when working on a tight deadline. Using online video, the new hire can learn the processes of the organization while completing work.

Educational video distribution is a moving target, and the options for distributing video can be daunting. Apple, Amazon, Google, and others all have separate ecosystems for video distribution. The ultimate solution for many is to have a presence in each ecosystem; however, learning exactly how to prepare videos, apps, and metadata content for each can be time-consuming and confusing.

Video is all around us. But what does video actually do to the brain? And are there best practices to keep in mind when you use video for learning? A nice video is not always a good video for learning purposes.

Incorporating video in a responsive performance support project can be daunting. Video done for vertical delivery comes with specific dos and don’ts. This session shows how to use vertical video, the new Adobe Animate CC, and Adobe Captivate to make cost-effective, rapid mobile performance support modules.

The quickening pace of change and increasing learner expectations demand learning approaches that can be produced quickly, at lower cost, and are easily accessible and readily available. Removing employees from the workflow for classroom sessions is not always feasible, nor does it provide the necessary just-in-time support. At the same time, the knowledge and information learners must have to support customers has expanded. Finally, the workforce is more distributed, more virtual.

Video is beginning to dominate the focus of learning and development. The technology and techniques for creating effective video content are now reaching most people responsible for using this medium to improve organizational performance. With a plethora of approaches around animation, motion, and streaming, where is one to begin?

Video is not a new medium, but not every instructional designer or developer intuitively knows how to create video or what makes it good. It’s important to understand the qualities that make for great videos. Organizations need data to drive decisions, and research is available to do just that.

There’s no question that video is trending upward and becoming more viable as a workplace learning and development (L&D) solution. Still, one significant barrier is focusing on the video itself—the videography and/or animation and editing that leads to the final product. Like all solutions from an L&D perspective, it still needs design. For video, that design document is a script, and it’s one of the most vital and most often ignored steps in the video production process. But how does someone with an L&D background learn to write better scripts?