eLearning Experts / Materials

Video is expensive and frequently the wrong form

It cannot be skimmed, searched, or read at your own pace.

Video has become the default form for online content and it has specific properties. It runs at the presenter's pace, cannot be scanned to find the relevant part, is hard to search, and is significantly more expensive to update when something changes.

For some content it is clearly right: anything where watching a physical performance matters, anything where a person's manner conveys something, anything demonstrating a process in a real environment. For explaining a concept or listing requirements it is usually worse than text, which the learner can read three times as fast and return to.

The most common misuse is a talking head reading slides. That combines the disadvantages of both forms: the pace of speech with the information density of a bullet list, and no possibility of skimming.

Where video is used, length discipline matters more than production quality. A rough four-minute clip that shows one thing is watched; a polished twenty-minute lecture is abandoned at minute six, and the abandonment point is measurable in almost any platform.

There is one use of video that is consistently underexploited, which is recording a person doing the actual task in the actual environment, with the ordinary noise and difficulty included. Learners report that this is far more useful than a polished demonstration in a clean setting, because the clean version omits exactly the conditions that make the task hard.