Elearning video tips and best practices you should never ignore

8 effective video elearning tips and best practice

Engaging and educational, when people get video right it can have long lasting impact. And, nothing is as powerful as employees creating online learning videos themselves!

In fact, with the rise of distrust in leaders, employees are relying on their peers to help them learn and influence how they feel about things. Additionally, with hybrid work becoming the norm, learning and development teams are faced with the challenge of creating a new hybrid workplace learning strategy. One in which employee-generated content helps not only share ideas and knowledge but digitises those watercooler moments employees are losing by not being in the office.

If you’re going to create engaging elearning, you need to keep your learners and video creators focussed.

1. Focus on your programme and elearning objectives

Whether your employees are watching a video to learn or they’re recording their own learning stories to share with the team, you won’t create the right impact if they don’t know what they’re trying to achieve. Setting clear objectives for your videos (and any wider learning initiative) will help everyone stay on track. This should link to an overall engagement, behaviour change or performance goal.

Learning and development teams need to make sure they keep learning objectives high level and don’t get stuck on the detail of the course content. These can be included in your online learning script and storyboard. You may be looking to raise awareness or embed behaviour change, but whatever it is, think about the actual results you need to see. Helping people understand the purpose of the learning before you ask them to hit record will keep messaging aligned and empower them to deliver the best possible employee-generated video. Your job is to make sure your creators know exactly what the learning objectives are so they can stay on message.

2. Know your audience

You may know L&D or your subject matter through and through, but how well do you know your video’s audience? Before you start creating videos, do a bit of research. What is your demographic? What are their knowledge, skill and experience gaps? What are the barriers they face? Finding out more about your audience will help you structure videos that resonate and create the learning outcome you want to see.

With employee-generated video, recording will be part of the learning experience. So, when you invite them to contribute, your audience research can help. What will motivate them to record? What will they see as personal risks and how can you mitigate these? Do they have experience of sharing expertise? Understanding and responding to what they need will help them produce more effective and authentic videos – engaging your video creators and subject matter experts is key.

3. Be clear on the benefits

When you’re inviting employees to contribute their own elearning videos, be clear about how the process will benefit them. From sharing their expertise and helping others, to embedding their learning and developing future skills – this is a learning experience in itself and there are plenty of benefits to choose from! If they focus on why they’re recording the video, they’ll overcome some of the self-doubt that can creep in as a novice video creator.

At StoryTagger, we use the Creator Venn when asking people to record a video. One of these pillars is making sure your video creators have a purpose – why should they create something for you? If you’ve failed in the past to get your people to create something of value, it might be that you failed to answer one of these questions.

Of course, there also has to be a clear reason for a busy employee to press play and watch the videos produced. If these user generated videos are going to grab and keep your learners’ attention, the viewer needs to know how it’s going to help them. Find out what it takes to keep them interested and watching.

4. Keep it relevant

From day-to-day tasks to urgent deadlines, there are lots of demands on people’s attention. If they’re going to engage with your video learning, it needs to feel relevant immediately.

There’s no better way to do this than going direct to the people who know best and getting employees to create elearning videos. Providing the right tools and support will help empower everyone to share their expertise so your learners will find relatable stories from a diverse and inclusive range of voices and faces that make up your business. Hearing these authentic lived experiences creates far more emotional connection than top-down corporate learning. In the long term, it also decentralises L&D and enhances the learning culture across your organisation.

5. Make it concise

Learners can quickly lose interest, especially when faced with lengthy elearning video or irrelevant course content. A university study has shown that engagement drops dramatically after six minutes of watching a video. So, try to keep your elearning videos below six minutes. Two-three minutes is even better.

If there’s a lot to say, think about how it can be made more digestible for your learners. Help employees who are recording videos break their story up into shorter parts and stay succinct. Create prompts and use section time limits to keep them short, relevant and to the point. Employee-generated video tools like StoryTagger can help you do this.