How to Make Learning Content Lively and Interactive with Video

 By Danielle Slatinsky


Kirstin Lynde, Director of Learning and Development at Randstad, and Michael Kolowich, Founder of Knowledge Vision, gave a webinar on March 22 titled “Liven up! How to Bring Your Online, On-Demand Training Content to Life with Video.” The webinar addressed how to effectively transfer learning content to an interactive video format.

Keeping Up With Technology and Lowering Cost

Kirstin began the presentation by explaining how important it is to avoid “death by PowerPoint” and make learning videos accessible and lively. She explained how imperative it is to have training tools that let the trainer's personality shine; the on-demand training content needs to have life and energy. She also mentioned that virtual notes and handouts can supplement a training video presentation.

Michael added to what Kirstin discussed by talking about how online learning is becoming necessary for most organizations. He explained how airline tickets are typically the most expensive items that companies buy. Purchasing tickets for experts and new employees to travel becomes very costly.

In an age where nearly every person is familiar with YouTube and Netflix, most people are comfortable learning through videos and technology. Michael believes that online video presentations are the most effective tool for corporate learning, and he also mentioned that footnotes and activities can be incorporated into the videos for additional material and interaction.

Corporate Goals and Content Breakdown

When Michael completed his portion of the presentation, Kirsten started speaking about what she does at Randstad, which is a global provider of HR services. She discussed how there are two main corporate goals: to create programs that have relevant, transferable content and to deliver presentations that have customized content in a cost-efficient manner.

Kirstin reiterated how necessary it is for corporations to utilize online training. She compared old styles of training to a broken record. Experts trained people once or twice a week, and they simply reviewed the same content each time. Some challenges that arose with the old form of corporate learning were limited time of experts, geography, and varying learner timetables. She explained how it is much more time and cost effective to download this information and share it with a wide audience.

Kirstin went on to discuss how to approach transferring this information into video content. The solution is simple: break the learning into two parts. A lecture section can be used to present information and get the main points across. Then there should be a processing portion in which there is an opportunity for discussion, questions and answers, and practical applications. The second portion allows for interaction without needing to be face to face.

Personality Goes a Long Way

Michael followed Kirstin's portion by discussing the importance of personable trainers. He said that it is very helpful to have a real audience in the room; it makes the speaker more comfortable to have a live audience. A script can be restrictive and lead to a very dry presentation, so Michael suggested to have trainers speak normally without much of a script, similar to how they would have in a traditional classroom session.

Effective Methods to Create and Market Corporate Learning Videos

The presenters emphasized the importance of a good quality of video for online training. Plain video, such as what is posted on YouTube, is not effective for this purpose. An enhanced online video presentation needs to have high quality streaming video; this means that the user can skip around as they wish and start from any place they skip to.

According to the speakers, for a video to be marketable and user friendly it should include PowerPoint, images, live web pages, and animations. Progress tracking is also very important because people like to know where they are at in the presentation. It is also helpful to allow the viewer to zoom in on slides.

After the presentation is completed it is important to know how to get it to companies in an efficient manner. According to the presenters, most presentations are uploaded into Cloud based storage after they are created, and then they are embedded on web pages. This allows the presentations to be viewed from anywhere.

Kirstin concluded the webinar by explaining how to sell the concept of online training videos to organizations. She said that it is most beneficial to explain how cost efficient this method of learning is. The cost of airplane tickets is removed, and experts avoid delivering the same content repeatedly. She said that this approach will usually convince companies to switch to online training videos.

Overall, Michael and Kirstin did a great job conveying how to bring training content to life with online videos. Have you implemented online training videos at your company?