Learners mostly laud e-learning videos because of its positive impact on online training. While some experts can use videos to create engaging e-learning effectively, some aren’t so good at it.
Below are the e-learning video best practices to assist educators in developing effective and engaging training.
Structure your information into bite-sized chunks
To achieve an effective learning program with videos, you should consider segmenting your video content into bite-sized chunks that can easily get absorbed.
That offers learners time to digest the information and connect the new knowledge to the existing knowledge. Long e-learning videos often lead to cognitive overload as a result of the inability of learners to identify the key learning objectives of the course.
In the case of long videos, add breaks in the form of quizzes and questions. That helps to relieve your learners’ brains and help them to retain information.
Create a good storyboard
Creating a good storyboard will assist you to see how every part of your video will look. Ensure you create it in such a way that reflects every intention you have about the e-learning video. To create a good storyboard, you should follow the steps listed below.
- Determine your video objectives. That’ll help you avoid distractions and stay focused.
- Brainstorm and come up with several ideas. Then allow creativity to flow to filter out the wrong ideas.
- Evaluate each scene of your videos by describing the vital elements.
- Bring the scenes to reality by rough-sketching the illustration of each of them.
- Make revisions on your storyboard and make changes where necessary.
- Review your storyboard and start production as soon as you feel good about it.
Focus your video on storytelling
To engage your learners with your e-learning video, ensure you focus more on stories. Develop a strategy that helps learners relate, follow it up by giving them the challenge to help them retain knowledge throughout the video, then provide solutions. Below are the steps to incorporate stories into your video-based learning.
- Use the story to put your learners through on how they can develop specific skills and knowledge of the task.
- Talk about the task by touching each step. That’ll ensure an engaging and interactive e-learning experience for your learners.
Make your e-learning video interactive
Watching a video can turn into a passive experience for your learners if it falls to be engaging and interactive. Making your e-learning video interactive will help to keep your learners engaged and motivated to learn more.
It also helps them to retain knowledge. One way to make an interactive e-learning video is by enabling your learners to choose their paths.
Another way is to include questions or quizzes at each scene. That’ll serve as a point of a break for them to retain the knowledge of the stage. You can as well add relevant links to your video, which will direct them towards extra training resources that they can use on their own.
Compress your video for mobile devices
Ensure you compress your video into a smaller size to give access to mobile users. The higher the file size, the harder it becomes to watch for mobile users with a poor connection.
There are excellent tools out there that will help you reduce your videos as much as possible without compromising the quality. By uploading a low size video with good quality, your learners can even get to download the video for later watch offline.
Develop or convert videos to MP4
Not all video formats work with mobile devices. For instance, FLV video format is not compatible with all video devices and as such could lead to a poor experience for mobile users.
To be on the safer side, create or develop your e-learning video inMP4 format. You can be sure that the MP4 format works perfectly well on all mobile devices and PCs.
In conclusion, you need not learn video production to achieve an effective e-learning video. By following the six best practices above, you can be sure of a video that is engaging and effective.
