Why Videos in Digital Learning?

A lot of organizations make it mandatory for their employees to take up e-learning trainings for a certain number of hours, every year. It’s obvious that these employees lose interest in taking the traditional courses after some time. So, how can we overcome this problem and make employees take these courses with interest, and not just because they are mandatory?

For that, it is essential to know what is trending these days. While researching on this, I was surprised to know that around 4,950,000,000 videos are viewed on YouTube every day (Source: Statisticbrain). This tells us that videos have gained the attention of many people. Taking advantage of this trending interest, we can convert learning content into the video format, to make it interesting for learners.

Here are three reasons that state why we need to use videos for learning.

1. Apt for Today’s Trending World

Videos are trending a lot in today’s generation. It is not limited to just a country or state, people across the world use the Internet to watch videos. One of the benefits of video is that it does not stick to one language. From the learning perspective, this feature of videos could be beneficial as it would be easy to translate videos into multiple languages.

Tip: Make it short and crisp

Lengthy videos might distract the learner’s attention, so keep your videos short, and limit the video to 2-5 mins, not more. Try to cover only one or two learning objectives per video.

2. Ease of Access

The best part of videos is that people can access them from anywhere and any device. A learner can simply take his phone and watch training videos in his break time. He only needs to have access to the Internet, which most people have these days. The learner can even pause the video and access additional resources.

Tip: Provide additional references or job-aids

With respect to the content, provide some additional references that the learner can save and view, even when he has no access to the Internet.

3. Increase Content Retention

You might remember a favorite scene from your favorite movie, even after years. That’s the impact of visuals in our day-to-day life. Similarly, having visually-rich images, text, and supporting audio helps increase content retention in the learner for a long time. Such videos have more impact on the learner than the usual e-learning courses.

Tip: Use minimal text and rich visuals

To grab the attention of learners and increase content retention, use minimal text onscreen. Depict the content using apt visuals or animations that fit the content well.

These are a few reasons we need to have videos for learning. Please do share if you have anything else to add to the list.