eLearning videos are a great way to help your learners stay engaged, whether they are students, colleagues, or employees. Videos can be an extremely useful learning tool, or if produced poorly, can cause bored and disgruntled watchers. So how do you keep your learners engaged?
How do you get the most engaging eLearning videos around? With eLearning video content produced by VP Legacies!
Designing eLearning Videos
When it comes to designing eLearning videos, there are a few things to keep in mind when keeping your students engaged. eLearning is supposed to be creative and fun, but how do we get to that point? Here are some tips to keep your learners excited and engaged in your content:
Related: 7 Types of eLearning Methods for Corporate Training
Value and Reusability
Whether it’s now or in the future, the value to the learner is arguably the most crucial aspect of an eLearning video. If the content helps them learn and actively reach their goals, it’s much more likely to have a lasting impact.
An easy way to make sure your content is tailored to your learners is just to ask. Create a couple of eLearning videos and show them to your target market.
You also don’t want your course to be outdated in a few years, so ask yourself, will this be helpful later on down the road?
Segmenting and Micro-learning
One of the best things that you can do is break up information into micro-learning chunks. By segmenting info into different sections, your learners can engage with small amounts of micro-learning video content allowing them to control how much they learn at any given time. This means turning a long course into shorter segments or adding in break times with things like a check on learning or Short exercise.
Remember, at VP Legacies; we embrace the principles of micro-learning. Why? Because we all live in a culture obsessed with instant gratification. When we want to buy something, anything for that matter, we open up a web browser and have Amazon deliver it within a couple of days. This is also how we learn. When you are looking for an answer to a question, you don’t normally search for a 2 hour long lecture or open a 250+ page book. What do you do? You open up google or youtube and search for a short piece of content to answer your questions.
Related: eLearning vs. Micro-learning: What Are the Differences?
Signaling and Motion Graphics
You can use text and symbols on the screen, also known as motion graphicis to highlight important points and quickly direct your students’ attention. Things like making keywords stand out, changing the contrast and colors of the screen, or symbols that direct the flow of information is excellent ways to achieve this.
The power of eLearning video is in the ability to paid audio with visuals so your learners both hear and see what you are teaching them. By highlighting a topic audibly and visually, your learner’s retention and engagement rates will go up significantly.
Modality and Content Delivery
Allow your learners time to decipher new concepts and give them complementary information streams to help along the way; this means trying something like splitting up a screen and having half of it show the person speaking while the other half shows the information supporting their speech.
The presenter can also demonstrate the process they are trying to teach while talking about it. Both of these examples convey information that complements each other and can increase engagementand the ability to retain and transfer the information.
Elimination and Simplicity
Information that may be interesting but doesn’t relate to the video should usually be eliminated. If it doesn’t contribute to the learning goal of that specific video or course, don’t put it in. Minimize things like complex backgrounds, animations, or music that can easily be a distraction to students. Keep it simple!
It used to be that learners would be okay with reading a 200+ page book to get the answer they were looking for. Now, learners would rather read a 15 page book that teaches them everything they need to know. The same thing goes for video eLearning. Eliminate the fluff and keep it simple.
The Best Types of eLearning Videos
Most eLearning videos are as unique as the person giving instructions, but there are some common themes that you can adapt to give your course the edge. Let’s take a look at the four most popular types of videos for eLearning:
Related: 9 eLearning Trends
1.Screen Capture eLearning Videos
There are numerous screen capture tools out there that are easy to use to easily capture your computer, tablet, or mobile screen in addition to your voice and mini portrait showing your face. After using numerous screen capture tools, we have settled on Loom because of its ease of use and easy filing system.
The reason why we really like screen capture eLearning videos is because our research has shown that learners, for the most part, prefer seeing or being shown how to do something instead of just being taught the theory. Screen capture eLearning achieves with simply and with very little initial investment.
The most important part of producing screen capture eLearning videos is to make sure you are concise (please keep your videos under 10 minutes long), be very specific with naming your videos and have some sort of filing system setup.
To learn more, book a free consultation with one of our co-founders or client success managers.
2.Recorded Coaching or Training Call
At this point, we believe it is safe to say that we all use some sort of video conferencing software (i.e. Teams, Zoom, HD Meeting, etc.) for meetings with our teams, prospective clients, and students. Well, as far as we are aware, the majority, if not all video conferencing software has the ability to record.
Record everything. Really, we mean it. You will have to get everyone’s permission who is on the call and the easiest way to do that is to ask everyone to respond “yes” on the recorded call. Now, you don’t actually need to record every call, but if you are wanting to build out a training program for sales, record every meeting you have with your sales team about sales.
Why do this when your calls don’t fit into the micro-learning category of being 10 minutes or less? Because you can repurpose the content later by cutting down an hour long sales training call into 6+ micro-learning videos.
Want help getting an eLearning content production strategy in place? Book a free consultation with VP Legacies.
3.Professional Live Action Video Recording of the Instructor or Subject Matter Expert
Now, what if the content you want to teach isn’t conducive to a screen capture or coaching call recording to teach? No problem, that’s when a professional live action video of your instructor or subject matter expert shines.
In the example above, you see Mark going through the “Adult Cardiac Arrest Algorithm” as part of an Emergency Medical Service (EMS) training program. The best way to create this type of eLearning content is to film your subject in front of a well lit green screen so that you have a lot of editing options now and 5 years from now if/when your content changes.
You can also keep things pretty simple and instead of having a lot of motion graphics popping up on the screen (which increases video cost as well), have a clean backdrop inserted in post-production like the screenshot below:
For help deciding how to best utilize professionally shoot eLearning video, book a free consultation with our team.
4.Simple Animation like Whiteboard Videos
While this is our last suggestion, this is not the last type of eLearning videos. First and foremost, animation, even simple animation, can be very difficult to create. Especially the first time. This is because, unless you work with a company that is on the higher end of the pricing spectrum, it can take way too much time, and you may never get what you want.
So, why are we talking about simple animation and whiteboard animation videos here? Because when they are executed properly, your learners love it, and their useful life tends to be much longer.
So what do you do? Well, this is why we are the experts. If you are specifically looking to create animated eLearning videos, we have a time-tested process to keep the price tag manageable and, most importantly, the headaches nonexistent. Book a free consultation with our team to find out more.
Custom eLearning Development
At VP Legacies, we practice the LISO (large input, speedy output) method to produce high-quality eLearning content faster than anyone else. We know that it can be challenging to choose what type of eLearning content to produce and produce a large amount of content at scale. This is why we exist. To help you navigate both so that you can provide value to your learners ASAP. Engagement is our number one priority; you can have the best material in the world, but without engaging your employees or students, that doesn’t matter. Let us help you through the eLearning experience!
Ready to learn more? Get a custom quote for your next eLearning videos!
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