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eLearning

How to Create Awesome Training Videos (+8 Great Examples)

7 min

Many billions are lost annually due to employee turnover. Offering your staff training opportunities will increase loyalty and engagement within your company and stop your employees from searching for another job.

Excellent training can improve employee engagement and boost productivity. This way, training adds value to a business. But how do you make training productive and engaging for your staff?

One of the most popular e-learning trends for 2020 is Microlearning, an educational system that relies mainly on bite-sized courses with short duration and small chunks of information. Today’s learners prefer microlearning, which helps them learn on the go, without spending too much time and effort.

Videos are an exciting means for Microlearning. Video has the unique ability to explain the unexplainable simply and effectively. This is why they are also super useful in employee training.

Video is a rich and powerful medium is widely used in e-learning. The emergence now of interactive videos enhances learner engagement and improves the learning effectiveness of online courses. In this guide, we discuss why you should adopt video in your employee training, and we will also show you some real-world examples of how you can do that. Enjoy!

Videos in e-learning have two advantages: They are scalable, giving you the power to reuse them on different occasions in your business. And it’s available to revisit any time you like.

Videos are cost-effective and more comfortable to digest because they can be cut into short modules (compared to on-site training). With training videos in your employee onboarding, you increase the likelihood that the information will be retained from your learners and they also have the unique ability to provide clear instructions for products too large or complex.

And they can come in various styles:

Understand your audience

You want your trainees to take the training videos seriously, create a script and refine it according to their interests. Tailor the videos to their specific needs and ensure your videos are mobile-friendly. Strike a balance between entertaining and professional, to make the videos purposeful.

Have an objective for each video

You subconsciously should show your viewers what the purpose of the video is. Insert an intro to your video explaining what is going to be taught. You can storyboard your video to organize your video. This planning will help you with your video production. Be clear and concise about what you want in your video. Edit out anything that isn’t relevant and focus on what matters.

Engaging

Your video needs to be as appealing as possible. There are numerous ways to do this. You might want to try to add aural features to highlight and reinforce important points. But, you should also learn how to draw attention to video lectures. The critical problem of learning with video lectures is students’ sense of distance between you and them. Emotion can shorten the distance. The emotion expressed by the instructor’s facial expressions creates the perception of closeness. Namely, it could overcome students’ feelings of isolation.

Keep it short and to the point

Most people don’t watch videos for longer than 6 minutes. So, it is better to keep the idea of a short attention stream in mind the next time you create a training video.

Instead of long droning videos, use short videos.

Break them down in small chunks

By using small chunks of video content, trainees can see what information will be covered in each video segment. Your students will understand what each video covers and won’t be forced to scan through an hour-long video to return to the information.

Edit the video

The real work continues after the video has been recorded, thus at the post-production stage. Usually, for high-quality corporate training videos it takes between 30-60 minutes to edit each minute. Luckily, nowadays, video production is not just a privilege of the professionals. Impressive techniques that are popular amongst experienced moviemakers have become available to beginners too. You can find much affordable software and easy-to-use apps to unleash your creativity.

Compress the video

Using a very high definition of videos might not be great when someone is watching from mobile devices or from a non-high-speed internet connection. It’s better to compress videos before uploading to a learning management system.

Compressed videos take less time to load and are more accessible even when employees attend the training program from their mobile devices.

Example 1: Simple Slides Presentation training

Slides presentations (usually made in Powerpoint) are one of the most popular and easy to create lecture styles. The presenter is either absent or present with their voice. Slides presentations can become very engaging if you put a lot of work into designing each of the slides carefully.


Slides presentations can also be overlapped by the instructor’s presence (here’s an example) or be split in a screen that also contains the instructor:

Example 2: Screencasts

Screen-casts, also known as video screen capture, is the most suitable means to teach computer software. They consist of “the capture all of the action on a computer screen” format and often contain audio narration.

Creating a screencast helps technical instructors show off their work. Instructors can also create screencasts to demonstrate the proper procedure to solve a problem. Here is an excellent article with tips and techniques for creating winning screencasts.

The screen movement can either be static or dynamic (follow the cursor). A screencast is essentially a movie of the changes over time that a user sees on a computer screen, enhanced with audio narration, so the agency is quite strong.

How to make screencasts the right way.

Example 3: Teaching masterful techniques

Wondering how best to use video to train employees? If you own a coffee shop, teaching new hires how to create the best coffee is very necessary. This video clocks in at less than three minutes, but it gives you a close-up look at the technique of making the perfect latte. With such videos, you don’t have to find a high-level pro who goes around training everyone personally.

Example 4: Interactive video training

Interactive videos offer immersive training experiences. The viewer is put into the role of an active participant. This is easily achieved through various interactive buttons and labels.

The viewer interacts with several objects, inside the video and reads information about them, and selects the right objects in the scene when asked. Also, the viewer has the choice to navigate in several parts of the video content with navigation buttons and answer questionnaires inside the video. In the latter case, the video stops, and the user interacts with a question. Then, the video gives feedback according to the user’s choice.

Very popular are also videos where you have to decide what you are going to do. In this case, we are talking about branched videos, where the viewer sees a different version of it according to their path choices. You can see an example here.

Example 5: Animation Training Video

Animated video lectures are becoming more and more popular, allowing students to learn in a fun and relaxing way. Animations are very similar to the cartoons we used to watch in our youngest age and maybe that is what makes them so engaging:

By giving glimpses of such situations, it helps people first to understand the issue, then how to deal with it.

In this type of lecture, the main protagonist is the media presented while the instructor plays an assistive role with a voice-over (most of the time). The most popular tools to create animations are Animaker and VYond.

Example 6: Live Action With Animation

Fascinating are videos that combine animation with real video.

Animated heroes in videos make a huge impact. Rather than narrate videos, it is better to create little animations so that the viewer feels an expert is preaching them. An authoritative tone isn’t always the most persuasive.

Also popular are the hands writing boards:

In this type of lecture, the viewer sees the words being written at the moment of speech. In this category, we can also include whiteboard animations (which are available on most video animation platforms). The instructor can choose if a hand will be visible or not.

Example 7: Selfie videos

Selfie videos are much more lively and engaging, and they make the background much more interesting for the viewer. They can serve numerous purposes from traditional lectures with the presence in full screen to extended field trips.

Selfie videos are speaker-centric, and the presenter may be interspersed with slides, animations, other videos, images, etc.

Example 8: Conversation

Creating videos where two or more people discuss a topic and export valuable conclusions is a very engaging and authentic way to convey essential messages. At the same time, it is the most effective way to emphasize the people in a lecture video.

Just make sure the conversation is substantial and has something great to offer. The footage may sometimes be adorned with slides or key-words.

Example 9: Short Videos focusing on one skill

As we mentioned earlier, an employee training video doesn’t have to be long to be effective. With short videos, you can give a few tips with close up shots to show your students how to learn a new skill. For example, this video about how to deal with angry customers does the job in less than 90 seconds.

Thankfully, you don’t have to compromise between cost or effectiveness when you create training videos. You can save money and give people what they want in one fell swoop.
Ongoing training of your staff is vital to ensure your business is progressing. If you don’t invest in training courses for your staff, you could find they become disengaged and disinterested. This endangers that they will stop doing their job well.

Before you even begin creating your instructional video, you will need to consider your lecture style-whether you are going to use a slides presentation, create an animation, a selfie-style video, etc.

Choosing your instructional video style is essential, as this will inform your lesson plan, dialogue, and editing of your video. If you want to learn more about training videos, read our Video-Based Learning ebook or visit our unique online course in our Academy!

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Course Designer & Content Creator at LearnWorlds

Anthea is a Course designer and Content Creator for the LearnWorlds team. She holds years of experience in instructional design and teaching. With a Master of Education (M.Ed.) focused in Modern Teaching Methods & ICT (Information & Communications Technology), she supplements her knowledge with practical experience in E-Learning and Educational Technology.