How to get most out of videos? 

Video as a means of communication is becoming more and more common for all sizes of companies. Smartphones, drones, and Social Media make it very easy for everyone to produce and publish videos, and it makes it possible for companies to act in a much more agile manner and reach a much larger audience than they were able to do in the past – especially if they use eLearning creation authoring software .

Preparation and quality are still very important

Before creating your first videos, there are a couple of considerations and preparations you should do. Since our specialty is micro-learning which companies publish for customers, the user of products, partners, or employees, the focus of this article is the preparations for that purpose. But the same “rules” can of course generally be applied for other purposes.

#1 The duration of each video should be short

Research shows that the ability to learn, for the majority of people, drops significantly, if the videos are too long. The length of each video should be 3 minutes or less to ensure comprehension. In addition, you should usually only cover one main topic in each video, and include from a few to 8 videos, not more than 10, in one micro-learning content version.

#2 The target group

Who is the target group of the video? Is it well defined? It is important that you are fully aware of who you are addressing with the video.

#3 The idea? What do you want to achieve with the video?

The overall learning goal and sub-goals of each video have to be defined – what should the learner learn and why? What do you want to achieve with it?

#4 The message

When you have established who and why you can start looking at how the “message” in the video should be delivered. To ensure impact you need to keep three elements in mind: Is the message up-to-date? Is it relevant for the target group? Is the target group able to identify themselves with the message?

#5 Storyboard

Make a storyboard to direct the content of the video and what should be said in each scene.

#6 The video quality

Since the topics and their learning goals are all now well-defined, it is time to start recording the videos. But please consider, that even though it has become easy to record and edit videos, the quality of the videos is still important. If the picture and sound are of poor quality it may very well disturb the learner and have a negative impact.

Increase impact with interactive practice sessions and test

Because the goals are well-defined it is also easy for you to create questions. Using an interactive practice session with your videos will increase the impact. The number of questions should be kept low.

In most cases, we recommend that the learning content includes a test, where the user can earn a badge. To increase the impact, we recommend including multiple passing levels, such as a Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum level. This can positively motivate the learner to finish all parts of the learning content, and additionally continue trying to learn and understand the topics if they score low. Some will even seek to achieve the highest badge level – and if the results are allowed to be shared, this will be an important part of the gamification effect as well.

What does micro-learning content training with videos look like?

Check how it can look on uQualios tutorial platform.