E-learning Video Production: What You Need to Know in 2024
In 2024, video-based e-learning is booming. Universities shoot lectures of professors speaking in their classrooms. Experts create podcasts to reveal their professional tricks and gain popularity. HR departments order animated content from video production studios to speed up onboarding for new employees and make it more effective.
However, not all e-learning videos are equally effective. So how to reach your goals by leveraging video formats? In this article, Blue Carrot, a studio that has been creating educational animation for a decade, shares tips on how to avoid mistakes when creating video-based courses and how to make their production resource-effective.
Why does one need educational videos?
Video is one of the most effective formats for distance learning. In turn, e-learning video content is very diverse. Its most popular genres are lecture recordings, animated explainers with or without voiceover, interactive videos, and a hybrid format combining the expert’s speeches with animated diagrams and additional video quotes.
Educational video content is necessarily expensive and challenging to produce. In particular, lecture recordings, whiteboard animation, or educational screencasts are much more accessible than educational videos featuring 3D. Video production can be made cheaper by leveraging stock videos or eliminating voiceovers. However, it is better to make such decisions by consulting with an e-learning video production company that can predict whether your future video will remain effective if you decide to save money.
The key advantages of e-learning videos include the following:
- Teaching a large number of people at the same time;
- Students can watch videos repeatedly and learn at their own pace;
- Information in a multimedia format is more digestible than a printed text or classic offline lecture;
- Video keeps students focused longer and makes them more involved in learning.
For more details, check this NCBI study.
When planning a campaign based on educational videos, it is essential to understand your goals and the conditions the viewer will view your content. The series of short videos on financial literacy differs from the long video on the history of ancient Greece. In other words, remember your target audience’s profile and the training course’s primary objectives, which can be increasing the students’ awareness or teaching them something they can use in practice.
3 tips for teaming up with an e-learning video production company for brands and institutions
To produce high-quality video content, you need to have clearly structured educational materials and possess technical means, not to mention skills in writing scripts for educational videos, editing, and sound design.
We advise you to take the first steps toward creating online video courses with a reliable video production company to avoid common mistakes. Here are some cooperation tips from Blue Carrot:
#1 Your purpose, audience, and learning materials
It’s okay not to know how to turn your research paper into a 2-minute educational video. However, there are questions to which you definitely know the answers. In particular:
- With whom do you want to share information?
- What result do you expect after that?
- What facts and ideas do you want to convey?
The answers to these questions will help you imagine what your video could be: a recording of a lecture, animation, or content edited from various live-shot scenes.
At this stage, consider the conditions under which your audience will perceive your content, as well as your budget. All this will help you choose the video’s artistic technique, format, and length.
#2 Storytelling and visual style
Videos built according to storytelling principles will always be more effective than any other. This involves having a hero in the story that the audience can follow and obstacles on their way. In addition, any story has a multi-act structure with an introduction and climax.
To write an exciting story based on your educational materials, actively participate in the storyboarding process conducted by a chosen video production partner. This stage precedes the writing of the final version of the script and aims to create an intriguing story.
Storyboarding parallels the work on the plot and concerns the aesthetics of your future video. Aesthetics determine the atmosphere of your content, help attract the audience’s attention, and reinforce your message. That’s why corporate training videos often follow brand books.
#3 Consider feedback and scale
If you are just starting to use video in your e-learning projects, it’s better to lower expectations for the first materials. Start with small budgets and try to get as much information as possible to improve your future courses. In particular, publish videos on different platforms, motivate your audience to interact, and test short and long versions of videos.
Consider that short videos, in which you share a small number of logically related facts, display complex terms on the screen, and comment on the events in the frame with a voiceover, often work best. Also consider the scale and format of your videos – to resize your videos for different platforms, VistaCreate is a great tool to use that is easy to use and provides many different tools to help your project come to life.
Interactive elements also keep your audience engaged, so make sure your video or description includes questions, practice exercises, or quizzes.
Final thoughts
Educational videos are a powerful e-learning tool used by both educational institutions and businesses. For your educational videos to be compelling, consider your target audience’s characteristics, educational goals, and budget when creating them.
Plot, artistic technique, video length, and sound design also impact the effectiveness of your content, and it’s essential to entrust the production to experienced creative teams and study audience feedback.
