Six online course experts share tips on making engaging video training

The COVID-19 epidemic has been a boon for the online education industry. Video conferencing systems were crucial in making online lessons feasible throughout the pandemic, demonstrating their value as a way of continuing proper education despite the outbreak. One research from Google shows that 58% of people said that they are using digital video to learn new skills.

Videos are integral to online education. The key for videos to be successful is for them to be as immersive as possible. This means that they have to be both efficient and interactive.

Thus, content creators should consider a couple of adjustments:

1. A lot of course creators struggle with creating videos that spark audience engagement, which could result in lower retention rates. 
2. You could spend days or even weeks finishing your video if you do all the works by yourself. 
3. Videos could contradict the text message, and students may end up getting different messages on an individual topic; which might confound them. 
4. For students, spending too much time on online learning platforms might lead to isolation, exhaustion, and discomfort because of reduced face-to-face interaction.
5. Online education requires strong self-motivation, discipline, and time management skills.

In order to help you avoid some of these issues, we reached out to several online course experts and asked them to share some of their tips and tricks that helped them in creating more appealing video training lessons. So, we asked one simple question:

1. What is the best advice you have on making video training more engaging for students?

We got their answers. So, let’s check them out together:

Jono Petrohilos from Course Creator Community:

“The best advice I can give to make video training more engaging for students is to be more animated than what you would be in real life. Being behind a screen already makes the personal connection less engaging so if your energy level is a “7” in real life - it will come across as a “5” on video. If you want to come across as a “7” on video - you’ll need your energy to be a “9”!

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Kate Prescott from Abridge Academy:

"My main advice would be to keep videos short and focused - no one wants to watch an hour-long documentary. I try to keep videos to a maximum of five minutes. Each video in the course should teach one thing. I usually plan three key parts to each video:

1. The core concept,
2. Some more in-depth explanation/example/work throughout the tutorial, and
3. A clear action plan for the learner to implement."

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Matt Hugg from Nonprofit Courses:

"Less is more. Breaking up instruction into short focused lessons of about four to seven minutes keeps the attention of your learner; this aids them in retaining the information. A small handful of these lessons, summing to no more than 30 minutes, makes up a good course section and aligns with how much time your learners will probably have for any one sitting."

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Krista Neher from Boot Camp Digital:

“When creating online learning experiences, it is important to remember the goal of the training and to supplement the videos with other resources to best achieve learner objectives. For example, when I'm designing a course on Facebook, advertising videos is a great way to share information and provide analysis. Our learner objective is for learners to be able to create and optimize a campaign. To achieve this goal, we would also go beyond the videos and provide additional templates, tools, and implementation guidelines. "

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Verity Sangan from Verity Sangan:

"My advice for making training videos more engaging is simple: think about the audience, time, and attention. In short, who are your audience? Is your video answering their questions and problems? Timing: keep your videos as short and precise as possible. Finally, attention. You need to keep people’s attention so that they can truly connect with your information. Keep things concise and keep your audience engaged."

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Stephanie Steggehuis from Just Know How:

“Don’t make the videos too complex as you don’t want to overload people with information. 

The best way to keep their attention is to have the content of your lessons on a slide, in keywords, and talk about it with a voice-over. Students do not want to see you just hear you and read the slides

Moreover, you need to know how to explain a certain topic! Creating videos for online courses is not that difficult. But the most important thing is that you go straight to the point when explaining an idea, and remember to always link it with an example (never take too much time to explain something as creators tend to overcomplicate it)."

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Wrapping Up

The general recommendation (as mentioned above) is to try to create videos that are short and straight to the point Additionally, another study of MOOC videos from MIT shows that the shortest videos (1-3 minutes) drive the most engagement. The more concise the video, the higher the participation. 

The magical thing about Omnisearch is that we can significantly improve your students’ engagement by turning all your video materials into searchable content in just one touch. Simultaneously, there are various other ways in which we can help you accelerate your course enrollment. If you want to learn more about how to create great learning experiences, feel free to book a demo with our team.