Our company is trying to create a specialized (college style) curriculum to train new employees in the insurance field. We want to use Video (can be up to an hour) screen share, and text with the ability to test at the end. Our goal is to have our students design the courses in storyline as they learn. We have created a template in Storyline as a baseline is there any other suggestions you would make? Thank you in advance for your help.
get hold of good resources, images, audio. Customise your course using the built in colour schemes and fonts.
You may want to look at creating a branding/building guideline document so each of the courses are consistent. Otherwise just get building your later courses will be better than your first courses but until you get started you don't know what you like, and what works well.
1 - First suggestion, please don't use 1 hour chunks of video. From a student perspective, it's a lot, and many students might tune out after 15-20 minutes, so the message might be lost. Try to stick to under 15 minute chunks.
2 - Definitely make sure you have a style guide that outlines branding guidelines, fonts and sizes, colours, etc. That way all students are building the course from the same guidelines to ensure consistency. If you just have students building the course without such a document and with only a template as a baseline, you might get lost in students having to do unnecessary revisions because they added their own flair to things.
I can't emphasize the first point enough. As a learner if I see a video stretches past about 10 minutes I immediatly start looking for other ways to occupy my time while it plays.
I would push for a use of interactive activities with short bursts of video instead of relying on video to do most of the work.
When it comes to attention span and retention, if you could turn this into a series of meaningful mini-coursels and make the video clips interactiveyou'd be doing a lot for both..
I echo the shorter video point. My experience is less than 7 minutes or people tune out. With that said you can make your videos interactive by pausing them and providing questions and interactions within the video prior to moving on. this may help break them up and also will ensure that your students are actually seeing the whole video as they can't just hit play and walk away.
There's a reason why TED Talks are limited to 18 minutes... You really should find ways to break up your videos to as short as possible; think YouTube, 3-4 minutes seems ideal.
And I couldn't agree more with what everyone is saying about a style guide. You need on not only for colors, fonts, graphic styles (photos vs illustrations, etc.) but also an editorial style guide for language. You want to set out ahead of time how you are going to refer to common elements like navigation links, warnings, perhaps even spelling conventions, e.g., US English vs UK English.
My first reaction was that 1 hour of video is a lot, but I see that point has already been made. One suggestion would be, even if you're chunking your video into smaller videos, is to offer a transcript with each video. You should be do this with every video anyway, but if there's a transcript handy, users who tend to get lost during video presentations can read along and have another way to stay engaged.
The best way I've found to do this is to put the transcript in the Notes section, add Notes to the player, and then change the "Notes" label in the player to "Transcript".
Not to throw a wrench in the process, but depending on how much experiences these students have with developing content (am I reading that correctly?), you might want to consider using Rise for development. It might end up giving you better results...
Chunking content is really the key here. More shorter lessons or segments is better than one long lesson. I always feel the smaller the topic you can cover in a lesson, the better...Not only does it help with learner attention span and fatigue, but it also helps the leaner mentally sort and classify the content they are learning.
A lot of really important and good points have been made. Because you will have different levels of knowledgeand skill for development it is imperativeto give good guidance on he expectation. This is where the style guide. Comes in handy. People without design experience may not understand things like consistent navigation, use of white space, limiting fonts, not overusing animations and transitions, etc. I also agree that ruse would be a great first phase for development. I also concur that 1 hr of video would be ways too much. Unless it is action packed with a big screen and popcorn I know I would drift off. Breaking it up and adding some interactivity would be a great way to keep people engaged. I hope to hear how your project turns out!
Everyone hit the main points already so I will add one more possibility. I also try to limit video to short chunks as well, but if you are dead set on using video for an hour, you can also add some interactivity to keep the learners' attention. You can set up cue points where the video will stop and automatically show a layer, then set the video to resume after the layer is closed. Make sure to put a transparent layer over the video so you don't get out of sync by seeking.
I prefer the shorter chunks, but this is a simple way to effectively break down a longer video to make it feel more interactive.
10 Replies
get hold of good resources, images, audio. Customise your course using the built in colour schemes and fonts.
You may want to look at creating a branding/building guideline document so each of the courses are consistent. Otherwise just get building your later courses will be better than your first courses but until you get started you don't know what you like, and what works well.
1 - First suggestion, please don't use 1 hour chunks of video. From a student perspective, it's a lot, and many students might tune out after 15-20 minutes, so the message might be lost. Try to stick to under 15 minute chunks.
2 - Definitely make sure you have a style guide that outlines branding guidelines, fonts and sizes, colours, etc. That way all students are building the course from the same guidelines to ensure consistency. If you just have students building the course without such a document and with only a template as a baseline, you might get lost in students having to do unnecessary revisions because they added their own flair to things.
I can't emphasize the first point enough. As a learner if I see a video stretches past about 10 minutes I immediatly start looking for other ways to occupy my time while it plays.
I would push for a use of interactive activities with short bursts of video instead of relying on video to do most of the work.
When it comes to attention span and retention, if you could turn this into a series of meaningful mini-coursels and make the video clips interactiveyou'd be doing a lot for both..
Best of luck!
I echo the shorter video point. My experience is less than 7 minutes or people tune out. With that said you can make your videos interactive by pausing them and providing questions and interactions within the video prior to moving on. this may help break them up and also will ensure that your students are actually seeing the whole video as they can't just hit play and walk away.
Good luck.
There's a reason why TED Talks are limited to 18 minutes... You really should find ways to break up your videos to as short as possible; think YouTube, 3-4 minutes seems ideal.
And I couldn't agree more with what everyone is saying about a style guide. You need on not only for colors, fonts, graphic styles (photos vs illustrations, etc.) but also an editorial style guide for language. You want to set out ahead of time how you are going to refer to common elements like navigation links, warnings, perhaps even spelling conventions, e.g., US English vs UK English.
My first reaction was that 1 hour of video is a lot, but I see that point has already been made. One suggestion would be, even if you're chunking your video into smaller videos, is to offer a transcript with each video. You should be do this with every video anyway, but if there's a transcript handy, users who tend to get lost during video presentations can read along and have another way to stay engaged.
The best way I've found to do this is to put the transcript in the Notes section, add Notes to the player, and then change the "Notes" label in the player to "Transcript".
Not to throw a wrench in the process, but depending on how much experiences these students have with developing content (am I reading that correctly?), you might want to consider using Rise for development. It might end up giving you better results...
Chunking content is really the key here. More shorter lessons or segments is better than one long lesson. I always feel the smaller the topic you can cover in a lesson, the better...Not only does it help with learner attention span and fatigue, but it also helps the leaner mentally sort and classify the content they are learning.
Sounds like a big project. Good luck!
A lot of really important and good points have been made. Because you will have different levels of knowledgeand skill for development it is imperativeto give good guidance on he expectation. This is where the style guide. Comes in handy. People without design experience may not understand things like consistent navigation, use of white space, limiting fonts, not overusing animations and transitions, etc. I also agree that ruse would be a great first phase for development. I also concur that 1 hr of video would be ways too much. Unless it is action packed with a big screen and popcorn I know I would drift off. Breaking it up and adding some interactivity would be a great way to keep people engaged. I hope to hear how your project turns out!
Everyone hit the main points already so I will add one more possibility. I also try to limit video to short chunks as well, but if you are dead set on using video for an hour, you can also add some interactivity to keep the learners' attention. You can set up cue points where the video will stop and automatically show a layer, then set the video to resume after the layer is closed. Make sure to put a transparent layer over the video so you don't get out of sync by seeking.
I prefer the shorter chunks, but this is a simple way to effectively break down a longer video to make it feel more interactive.
This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.