By whatever metric you choose to measure, videos have proven to be the leading means of content consumption today.
With attention spans getting shorter and shorter and the growing need for online training courses and remote learning solutions, videos are an effective way to deliver training content that keeps people engaged, which will improve retention.
The thing is, not all types of videos work well when your goal is to teach something or make sure your viewers have all the info they need to carry out a task successfully.
So, to help you focus your attention on the ones that better fit that goal, we’ll go into more detail on a few you can use to improve and enhance your online training courses’ effectiveness — like interviews, screencasts, and motion graphics videos.
Let’s jump right in!
Live-Action and Animated Videos: Using the Right Tool for the Job
Before jumping into the types of videos, it’s worth touching briefly on the topic of live-action and animated productions, given that your videos will mostly fall in one of these categories (with a few exceptions combining the two). Within the context of online learning:
- Live-action pieces — videos that feature real people in real-world environments — tend to be preferable for content where you need to showcase people’s reactions and emotions or that revolve around physical spaces.
- Animated pieces — those that feature animated illustrations and environments in different styles and compositions — tend to excel at condensing information and explaining complex topics in easy-to-follow ways.
So, to help you categorize and choose the right tool for each job, we’ll divide several different types of training videos we’ll be looking into using those two primary categories.
The Best Types of Live-Action Videos for Your Online Training Courses
Live-action footage is great when you need to add a personal touch to your content, when you want to prominently feature your educators or team members, or when you cover content closely tied to real-world environments.
Here are four types of live-action videos you’ll want to add to your online training platform.
Video Interviews
In terms of getting your information across in a relatable and personal way, interviews stand out as remarkably powerful narrative and information-delivery tools. It’s the main reason why well-made documentaries make for such powerful, compelling, and entertaining pieces.
Incorporating this type of video into your online training courses can go a long way in terms of fostering credibility and improving reception rates in a variety of ways.
Interview videos let you put a spotlight on subject matter experts who wish to share their knowledge, personal experiences and even practical insights and key takeaways — giving your viewers first-hand access to the perspective of professionals with hands-on expertise.
Last but certainly not least, by featuring a variety of interviewees, you get to provide a number of diverse perspectives on a topic. Fostering critical thinking and encouraging learners to weigh multiple perspectives and gain a more well-rounded understanding of the topic in question.
Testimonials
Video testimonials are most often used as part of your marketing and promotional efforts, but they can also be featured in your online training courses to increase learners’ confidence in both the material and its potential practical applications.
For starters, these pieces can go a long way in showcasing your online training course reach. Just listening to previous students discussing the benefits they derived from your course can work as motivational fuel for people going through your material and even introduce and encourage them to explore other related courses they might not have otherwise taken — which can help you increase the popularity of your less sought-after courses.
Most importantly, testimonials give you a platform to address your prospective learners’ concerns, directly addressing any doubt that might be keeping them from taking the plunge and taking your online training course.
Screencast Videos
A fairly potent didactic teaching tool, screencasts are a type of instructional video that revolves around recording what’s happening on a computer screen while a process is being carried out.
For starters, these videos are ideal for guiding viewers through detailed steps to accomplish something using a piece of software, making them a must-have for any online training course that deals with such things.
But beyond that, a series of screencasts can give you the perfect stage to have your instructors demonstrate their technical skills using an app or carrying out a computer task. They also make it easier for students to visualize the practical steps involved in such tasks and even use the video as a template or guide that can be referenced later when they are practicing on their own.
Last but not least, your instructors can create screencast tutorials to help students troubleshoot or navigate through problem-solving scenarios that illustrate in a more practical way the theory behind your courses.
Video Tours
Video tours can be a powerful and engaging format that allows employees to explore physical spaces when and where it’s convenient for them. As part of their onboarding, new employees can familiarize themselves with your facilities before they’ve even set foot on site. Likewise, employees can get acquainted with an upcoming on-site project, learning any new techniques or skills that may be required in advance of the job, which saves time and money in the long run.
Manufacturing employees can walk through complex processes, equipment operation or procedural steps in a risk-free setting that they can repeat as often as they need. Video tours can serve as a viable alternative to in-person visits within the context of online learning, allowing you to enrich the educational experience with real-world examples and explorations.
Video tours offer all employees a cost-effective, convenient way to gain a realistic view of different scenarios, work environments, or processes that help them relate theory to practice, making training more relevant and practical.
The Best Types of Animated Videos for Your Online Training Courses
Video animation can be a powerful asset when you need to simplify complex topics in ways that a broad audience can easily understand, when you want to illustrate intricate processes that would be difficult to capture or reproduce in a live setting, or when you want to make your content more approachable and entertaining to improve information retention.
Here are three types of animated videos you’ll want to add to your online training platform.
Whiteboard Animated Videos:
The whiteboard animation style has been uniquely designed to effectively condense and deliver large amounts of data in interesting ways. It simulates concepts being drawn on a whiteboard that then animate and transition, building upon one another to convey information.
What that means is that this type of explainer content is educational in nature, making it perfect for most online training courses’ repertoire. The style gives you very distinctive ways to convey a story, illustrate concepts with dynamic visuals and even provide detailed instructions using narratives to help viewers retain information.
This way of leveraging visual elements into your topic’s narrative cuts down the runtime of your videos dramatically, allowing you to do more with less — making them ideal when you need to develop short lessons about involved topics or summary videos that try to condense content from a number of different sources into one piece.
Motion Graphics
Motion graphics is another particular animation style that can contribute to your online training course videos in unique ways.
The nature of the style — which breaks down and illustrates elements and processes as geometric shapes and abstractions — gives you a distinct way to engage learners in your explanations and makes intricate topics much more visually interesting and easier to follow.
These animated abstractions let you synthesize elaborate ideas with visually distinctive shapes and animations that tell a story or illustrate information in a way that is particularly useful when your material involves a lot of data, statistics, dates or other mathematical input.
This style is excellent for presenting abstract ideas in a more concrete way using visual metaphors and analogies that help viewers understand what you mean and can hugely facilitate a deeper understanding of complicated concepts. By the same token, it can also help you bring important infographics and case diagrams to life, helping your students better understand, internalize and remember complex data.
Character Animation
Storytelling has been a reliable way to educate since the beginning of human history, and character animation is all about combining the appeal of storytelling with the information you need to communicate.
By using interesting characters and situations that are capable of entertaining as much as informing, you can transform the more sober parts of your online training courses into charming tales that viewers will want to engage with. They also give you a way to personify content, leveraging scenario-based learning to evoke an emotional connection with viewers.
Moreover, the adaptive learning potential of character animations can help you promote personalized experiences. Tailoring your content to be specifically appealing to the type of audience your courses are designed for — making it easier to hold their interest and attention and transforming the whole learning process into a much more enjoyable experience.
Wrapping Up
Training effectively is a challenge, and setting up platforms and content to do so through online training courses only adds to the list of things you need to manage to deliver information effectively.
Luckily, online video platforms and solutions like video editing collaboration tools can bring instructors and learners closer with a variety of formats and styles that facilitate information delivery and help you overcome the particular challenges of certain topics and types of content.
Whether live action or animation, the types of videos we talked about today are all poised to greatly contribute to your online training courses in a variety of ways. It’s time to start seizing the opportunities they present and start revamping your content in ways your viewers will appreciate!
