You’ve put hours into analyzing content, spent days painstakingly storyboarding your product and drafting the scripts, and carefully thought through navigation choices—and yet, when you show it to your client or stakeholders, you’re still met with “Great, but can you make it look nicer/better/modern/pretty?” What more can you do when you’ve utilized sound learning theory and development strategies, but you’re still expected to be a graphic designer on top of it all?

Interactive video for training and learning is an extremely beneficial method of engaging viewers and increasing knowledge transfer. Many people have heard of interactive video but might not know how to get started, what the best practices are, what’s possible, or how it works with tools they already use. This session will help companies and institutions add an engaging asset to their toolbox and be better informed in their video strategy planning.

Delivering short bursts of lessons over time is a solid approach for helping people learn and retain information, and one great approach for this kind of training is microlearning video. If you’re not producing one- to three-minute videos for your audience, it’s time to start. It’s not expensive, and you probably already have the tool you need on your computer: Microsoft PowerPoint. If you can create slides in PowerPoint, you can create microlearning videos, too.

It’s so easy to get caught in a rut making the same type of video, or to just go with the standard talking head video, but this can easily bore your audience and your developers. Furthermore, this lack of breadth in video types doesn’t allow for the video to really meet the needs of your audience.

Designers often find themselves playing many roles in training development. Due to time or budget constraints, the role that usually ends up taking a backseat is the role of graphic designer. And this is a challenge because solid graphic design makes a big difference in how people receive and process information, which is L&D’s ultimate goal. While graphic design can seem difficult and time-consuming, it doesn’t have to be.

Three-dimensional content is phenomenally cool—from basic polygonal models to full human-like characters, buildings, vehicles, and even complete environments. Because 3-D content has historically taken vast resources (i.e., time or money) to create, 3-D resources are often relegated to video games, simulations, and VR only. However, creating, editing, and obtaining 3-D models for everyday use in eLearning doesn’t have to be cost-prohibitive or take a lot of time.

Does the audio in your eLearning presentations sound too hot, too cold, or just right? Does your audio have background hiss or other unwanted sounds no matter how quiet your recording environment? Does your narration have noticeably loud “P” (plosive) or “S” (sibilance) sounds? These factors can distract your learner from the message you wish to present, and a distracted learner learns less.

As organizations grow, there is too much change occurring too frequently to rely on traditional forms of communication. Meetings, email, and training are just not sufficient to create organizational alignment at scale. Additionally, leaders in growing organizations consistently strive to become better communicators for their organization, and they crave a more authentic way to connect with large teams.

Many people making training videos are wizzes at the technology, but few are schooled in the editorial skills of crafting pictures to convey meaning. As a result, many training videos are boring and fail to engage learners. One reason is that video messages are picture-led. To truly engage learners, you need to create video with a picture-first mindset. You also need to play to its strengths as a modality.

Opportunities for practice, reflection, and receiving feedback are essential for improved job performance. Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) found that medical resident training did not yield an increase in the number of autopsies completed. Further, the residents felt unprepared for conversations with grieving family members when seeking approval to conduct an autopsy. The learning team was enlisted to develop a new approach to resident training to boost autopsy rates.

Live video streaming is everywhere. It’s being used for news events, conferences, birthday parties, and even training—basically, anywhere there is a smartphone and an internet connection. Streaming video is relatively easy, as your phone and social media tools make it simple to get started. Making that streamed video look and sound good, though, is the hard part—as is knowing what to do with it after the video stream finishes.

Extended BYOD (2 Hours)

Within the last two years, the use of video in corporate education has soared from 77 percent to 92 percent. A cohesive strategy for creating optimal video content must be in place to take advantage of the new contexts in which employees want to learn. Using microvideo for learning as part of this strategy will raise engagement among learners and reduce the amount of time to acquire knowledge. There’s a wide range of other benefits to this approach, including the ease of viewing microvideos on mobile devices. But just because a video is short doesn’t mean it’s effective. What skills do you need to build to produce microvideos that actually work?