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For Learning & Development (L&D) departments today, delivering relevant, supportive, and engaging learning material pretty much means one thing: optimizing content for the millennial learner. In just a few years, one in four individuals in the workforce will be of the millennial generation. That’s why if you’re actively seeking to teach, attract, and retain new employees, a significant portion of your training materials must be video-based.
A recent survey of YouTube habits found that millennials consume on average 6 hours of video content per day. And as video-learning provider Panopto points out, it’s not all just cat videos: ‘Nearly three-quarters of Millennials — 72% — are using YouTube to watch educational how-to tutorials.’
“Astonishing? For many, yes. But for educators, who’ve been working with Millennials for two decades now, these trends are simply a reflection of the way today’s young professionals have been taught — and specifically, how they’ve been taught to learn…A decades-old pedagogical tool, video is heavily used in education at all levels to improve problem-solving, stimulate critical thinking, and improve learner engagement.”
“What Millennial Video Consumption Means for Corporate Training” by Panopto
So, simply put, if you’re not incorporating video into your teaching and/or training materials, you’re fighting a major uphill battle. Below we’ve put together a list of just some of the benefits of video-based learning, and how video can help you boost your training efforts.
Show, don’t tell
This, many say, is the new mantra of eLearning. And it means that today’s learner is more likely to engage with and retain material that demands visual processing, as opposed to reading text or listening to a lecture. Business 2 Community cites a Forrester Research report that estimates that employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than to read documents, emails, or web articles.
The bottom line is: if you want your employees to engage with your training, you need to make it interesting, and videos are much more likely to keep their attention than textbook text documents or classroom lectures.
10 Reasons to use video for employee training & development by Business 2 Community
Moving vs. Static Learning Material
Similarly, Course Arc, a digital content creation platform, explains the psychology behind moving vs. static images in learning.
The psychology of learners is such that if they are left staring at static images for too long, their attention tends to “drift,” especially if the presenter is not engaging enough.
Course Arc
Even when video content is comprised mostly of static images (i.e. diagrams or flowcharts), there are ways to integrate some interactive features – like quizzes, for example – that can help engage learners more so than in other learning formats.
Taking the pain out of Complex Ideas
As the team at Skeleton Productions explains, even the most complex topics can be made to feel more manageable in video format. Boiling down a complex idea into conversational, video material can help convey concepts in meaningful ways that feel more accessible, and meaningful, to the learner.
Adaptations for practical skills (and mastery learning)
One of our favorite features of Business Simulations as video-supported eLearning tools is that they provide visualizations of practical skills. For example, videos are a great way to display and demonstrate case studies, clinical procedures, or operating processes. Visual displays of these processes help to facilitate mastery learning and reinforce information that has been previously explained in other formats.
Using animations to communicate abstract and visual concepts
As the team at CommLab points out, videos need not be composed of real images. Animations – such as the hyperpopular white-board drawing or animated avatars – are a great video-based tool to add brand and style to video while also getting across topics that would otherwise be difficult to explain.
Video as a way to reduce training time & cost
Relatively speaking, its fairly easy and cheap to produce good quality video content in today’s tech-dominated world. More and more providers of video creation and editing tools, designed to be easy enough for anyone to use regardless of technical experience, seem to pop up all the time. Education-geared platforms like CourseArc and Panopto provide tools to create, manage, and live stream educational video content, for example.
Video-based materials have a positive impact on training ROI by reducing cost as well as training time per individual. Today’s video-centric learners learn continuously, with a great deal of material consumption happening, for example, via a smartphone on the commute home as opposed to a traditional training workshop. Cloud-supported video materials can be delivered to users’ devices without much effort, letting learners login, play, and digest training materials at their own pace.
For more reading on video-based learning and its benefits, check out some of the links below:
Business 2 Community – 10 reasons to use video in employee training and developmentPanopto – What Millennial Video Consumption Means for Corporate Training