The science of learning has evolved over many decades, and understanding how people process and retain information is crucial for creating the most effective, efficient, and enjoyable e-training material.
In the past few years, e-training has progressed to become even more flexible, universally available, and is now preferred by ICT teams across the globe for training their employees.
Video Is Expected by Today’s Learners
One of the several foundations of e-training is, of course, training videos. Video itself is an extremely powerful and effective medium that, over time, has grown to become a familiar online tool for those seeking to learn everyday skills – on topics from baking recipes and changing a tire, to learning a language. If you need to learn how to do something, the first place you turn to is a free and readily available source like YouTube. With its nearly 5 billion video views every day and seemingly endless selection of educational videos, it has acclimated millions of viewers over the years to video learning. Thus, educational videos have now taken over as the preferred method of learning for new generations. So, it is not a surprise to learn that training videos have become an effective mainstream format sought after for training in the workplace as well.
Flint is the learning and content development partner of choice for many well-known global ICT service providers. Our team of experienced engineers, technical instructors, instructional and graphic designers, content developers and project managers support our clients through the development of effective training videos and other training material.
Interested in our Learning and Content Development Services? Learn more here.
Effective Engagement Is Key
Employee training in the ICT world is essential for the emergence of new technologies and the improvement of existing ones. Keeping team members up to date with training is a constant challenge for team leaders and learning and development professionals. Therefore, creating training programs that effectively engage the learner is imperative for successful learning. Employee training videos will certainly accomplish the needed results, and even exceed expectations in many instances.
But what makes training videos such a uniquely effective tool among the other available e-training formats?
What Makes Training Videos So Effective?
Overall, our brains respond better to audio-visual stimuli rather than to text and static images alone. Research points out that, on average, learners remember 65% of visual content So, using videos for training results in more effective grabbing and keeping of the learner’s attention and delivering almost immediate visualisation of a concept, thereby fostering a better understanding and retention of information by the learner.
According to ‘Video vs. Text: The Brain Perspective’, the primary reason for this effective response is that the human brain processes videos 60,000 times faster than it does text. 3 Since our brains naturally avoid cognitive stress and overload, we prefer mediums that are easily consumed, and this consequently allows our brains to increase cognitive capacity (also known as working memory) and focus on relating to the content matter itself, making information absorption more efficient.
In other words, training videos require us to utilise multiple senses, or “channels” (visual, auditory, etc.). This increases our available working memory by spreading out the cognitive load (information) among several different channels, instead of overloading just one channel and slowing down the learning process – if not shutting it down completely.
Types of Learners and Learning Styles
Each one of us has a different learning style for how our brains most effectively process information. These learning styles typically fall into one of four categories related to the senses: Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, and Kinesthetic, otherwise known as VARK.
Visual learners learn well through sight and comprehend information when it’s presented to them visually. Visual learning involves the use of videos, graphs, charts, diagrams, cartoons, etc. – anything that primarily catches the learner’s eyes and draws their attention to the important content.
Auditory learners seem to learn best when the subject matter is delivered and/or reinforced by sound – they are listeners. For employee training, this can come in the form of a learning podcast, webinar, an instructor teaching face-to-face or in a talking head video, or music, narration, and sound effects in a video.
Kinesthetic learners, sometimes referred to as tactile learners, learn effectively when they are actively involved. Examples can include interactive videos, site visits, demonstrations and multimedia presentations. It’s often a combination of several types of learning together.
Reading/writing learners prefer to learn through written text. Written assignments, taking notes, online quizzes, PDFs, documents, books, etc. are often used. In addition, exams/quizzes that include true and false or multiple-choice questions are often included in this category.
Most importantly, when we engage a number of these senses during learning, we understand and retain information more effectively – this mixing method is known as multimodal learning. With multimodal learning, learners are less likely to feel overwhelmed, especially when presented with a new topic to learn.
With multimodal learning, learners are less likely to feel overwhelmed…
At Flint, we meticulously keep up with any developments and improvements. Our content development and learning services team is always exploring the ways our world of ever-changing technology offers us newer and better strategies for creating superb training material, striving to reach learners in the most successful way.
Interested in our Learning and Content Development Services? Learn more here
Multimodality is often a part of the learning process, and although we may prefer one learning style over another, most people benefit from it, particularly its audio-visual elements. Because the different styles of multimodal learning regularly intersect with each other, video itself can be an all-encompassing employee training approach that effectively combines Visual, Auditory, Reading, and Kinesthetic learning. Such training delivers information to learners in an efficient and appealing way, thereby increasing engagement and immersion within a single medium.
More Immersive through Personalisation
This level of engagement can be taken a step further with employee training videos by adding personalisation as an important video design element. Studies show that personalised training videos result in significantly improved learner outcomes. Therefore, adding a presenter/talking head, having narration that speaks in a conversational tone, and creating videos that are bespoke (without reducing the relevance and versatility of the content), add a level of warmth and familiarity, – and all are effective methods of providing immersive training videos.
Impactful, Active Learning
Perhaps most importantly, training videos are also an excellent opportunity to encourage highly impactful, active learning through interactive content with elements that promote independent learning, such as: annotations, the ability to toggle between sections/important points in a lesson, and quizzes/questions (narrated, timed, or otherwise). When compared, interactive training videos have substantially more positive learning results than non-interactive ones, because they offer learners control over their learning pace and access is convenient.
Training Videos Done Right
At Flint, we make training videos that enhance your e-learning strategy by making concepts easily consumable through cognitive load reduction, increasing engagement through personalised content, and promoting active learning through superior interactive content. With this in mind, we are confident that training videos are a surefire opportunity for you to equip learners with indispensable learning experiences. With our expertise to guide us, we look forward to helping you explore the benefits training videos can add to your e-training strategy.
Are you ready to make video a priority in your employee training? Contact us and find out more about our training development capabilities.
Sources:
1 Jandhyala, Dana. Visual Learning: 6 Reasons Why Visuals Are the Most Powerful Aspect of eLearning, eLearning Industry, 8 Dec 2017. https://elearningindustry.com/visual-learning-6-reasons-visuals-powerful-aspect-elearning
2 Sengupta, Debadrita. Using Video-Based eLearning to Enhance Onboarding, eLearning Industry, 14 Aug 2019. https://elearningindustry.com/video-based-elearning-enhance-onboarding
3 Margalit, Liraz, PhD, Video vs Text: The Brain Perspective, Psychology Today blog, 1 May 2015. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/behind-online-behavior/201505/video-vs-text-the-brain-perspective
