How to: Video

Key Takeaway: You can easily include video in your own custom microlessons using SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s Video, YouTube, Vimeo or Integrated Media templates.

The use of video in elearning undeniably improves the quality of any lesson undertaken by a learner. Video is a medium that engages users across multiple senses, and with both sight and sound tuned to your message, your learners will become experts in no time. In this article, we will look some of the ways you can incorporate video into your own custom microlessons.

The Video template

Many companies have their own in-house instructional videos which they want to incorporate into SC Training (formerly EdApp). This is possible using the Video template. Here, you can upload any .mov or .mp4 files, and they will play in the app. You can optionally set the video to Play on Demand, which will mean that your learners must be online to view the video, but will reduce the download size of the lesson significantly.

While not all videos were designed for microlearning, often long training videos are broken up into separate topics, which can be cut up using programs like iMovie and put into separate microlessons. We have found that breaking up longer videos into shorter, manageable chunks means that you can produced focused lessons that immediately reinforce key concepts, rather than watching a long video followed by limited reinforcement.

When using the Video template, consider using programs to compress the size of your videos. This will minimise download time for learners, even in lessons where streaming is used.

The YouTube or Vimeo templates

If you haven’t got your own personal production company to produce videos for you, this does not limit you to having no multimedia content in your lessons. There is a wealth of content available for you to draw upon from YouTube and Vimeo, as people are continually uploading their own how-to videos, or opinion pieces.

Something a lot of instructional designers have found valuable is including videos customers post of themselves talking about the product a lesson is educating on. This offers a unique opportunity to easily display how customers view the product, what they like about it, and what features are important to them.

To incorporate a YouTube video in your lesson, copy everything after the equals sign in the URL, and paste it into the YouTube video ID field of the YouTube template, i.e. If the URL of the YouTube video you wanted to use was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WX58CZwyiU, you would paste in 4WX58CZwyiU to the YouTube video ID field. In the Vimeo template, you simply need to paste in the video ID to the Video ID field, found after the slash in the vimeo URL.

Integrated media

SC Training (formerly EdApp) also offers a way to increase the immediacy of video interaction in the form of Integrated Media. Currently, several templates support replacing the Title field with a variety of multimedia inputs (i.e. audio, image or video). These take on the role of the question in the slide, which allows for immediate reinforcement of the content.

We have found that this use of video further increases engagement with the content, as the combination of question and media in the same slide encourages the learner to hang off every word spoken in the video, in case they miss something that would have lead them to the correct answer. We have also seen an increase in repeated views of a video when used as part of Integrated Media.

When using Integrated Media in a template, you should try to ensure the learner has already been exposed to the template in its “classic” form – interaction in response to a text-based question. This ensures that the learner is familiar with the interaction required from the template, before seeing the template in an Integrated Media format, where the desired response requires more attention on the part of the learner.

Currently the list of templates which support Integrated Media are as follows; Multiple Choice, Multiple Choice: Image, Categorise, Connect and Rank. We will be adding to this list in the near future.

Summary

SC Training (formerly EdApp) offers a variety of ways for you to use video in your lessons, whether it’s your own curated content, or a collaborative work using YouTube or Vimeo video. This includes Integrated Media, a way to combine knowledge transfer and interactive reinforcement on one template.

How are you using video in your lessons? Record your thoughts in an email to hello@edapp.com and show us how it’s done!