Monday, August 27, 2007

Views on video in eLearning

If the reader's objective is to tape face-to-face presentations, and then deliver these as "e-learning," I predicts that the reader will be disappointed with the outcome.

Although many people believe video to be 'active' and 'animated,' in reality it is an extremely passive form of training and results in very low knowledge retention. Furthermore, people can read and ingest information about three times more quickly than when hearing information in spoken format. This means that unless the presenter is attractive, professional and smooth, the viewers will quickly disengage. We have found that videos that last more than about two minutes are abandoned quickly; this is even true for YouTube.

If you want to offer employees self-paced training, I suggest that you create Web-like content in lieu of video. This means that the content has tables of contents so that students can establish their own navigation path that takes them to material of interest. This becomes very 'active' learning because the students are in control of the experience."

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