How to Create an Excellent ELearning Instructional Video

Consumers spend an average of 100 minutes online watching video each day and when combined with television, many spend upwards of 5.5 hours daily consuming video content. For many businesses, learning how to create an excellent ELearning instructional video can make a huge difference in training costs, customer acquisition costs, or in the costs associated with educating members of their team. 

Producing an E learning instructional video that speaks volumes to your audience, delivers the appropriate training and education, and keeps your target audience engaged and entertained is certainly a huge undertaking. At Beverly Boy Productions, we specialize in producing top quality instructional video content that is ideally suited to a variety of industries. Give us a call to learn more about what it takes to produce excellent ELearning instructional video content for your business or brand!

Define Goals & Learning Objectives

The first step to learning how to create an excellent ELearning instructional video is to define the goals and learning objectives that you wish to accomplish with your content. Every great instructional video is the result of a carefully planned set of goals and objectives. As you plan your learning objectives, it’s important to consider 1 primary objective or learning outcome that will apply to the video. This should be included in your video title, too, so that your audience already knows what they can expect to learn if they watch the video.

Keep it Short & Succinct

You might initially find it difficult to grasp these two terms in the same sentence – short, and succinct. However, when it comes to creating excellent ELearning instructional videos, keeping the video short (under 6 minutes) is very important as we tend to lose audience focus with longer video content. Delivering succinct details that fully cover the topic at hand is also important. While it may seem difficult to achieve in 6 minutes or less, it’s important to understand that when you utilize video and narration to your advantage, you can deliver a lot of detail in a very short amount of time – let the visuals work for you!

There’s no reason to spend 10 minutes teaching something that can just as easily be taught in 3!  It’s a lot easier to maintain the focus and concentration of an audience for 3 minutes, than it is for 10. If you’re having trouble breaking down the concepts into short, teachable moments, you might be delivering too much detail. Consider breaking a long video down into several shorter videos when possible. Your students will thank you!

Manufacturing Training Video Production

Focus on Quality Not Quantity

A few quality words will always be better than several long, poorly written sentences! When learning how to create an excellent ELearning instructional video, make sure that you’re focused on quality, not quantity! 

Each word, each picture, each frame that you film should have a purpose. Plan your content carefully so that you know exactly what purpose each frame is fulfilling for your lesson. It may seem silly at first, but as you move further down the production journey, you’ll quickly find that staying heavily focused on quality and delivering maximum long-term value to your audience will help you to create better instructional video content than if you were to just let it all out.

A few well spoken words will always be better than a bunch of mumbled words that are haphazardly thrown together in order to get as much into the narration as possible! Short and sweet is always superior to long and messy!

Use Animations, Annotations & Text Overlays

To maximize the level of content you can teach, and the ability for a wider range of student learners to understand what you’re teaching, consider the use of animations, annotations, and text overlays throughout your video.  Learning how to create an excellent ELearning instructional video that incorporates these key features into the mix will help to keep your audience engaged and interested in what you’re teaching.

Annotations, including arrows that point to areas of importance or highlighting certain points of the video will help visual learners pick up on cues that they may have otherwise overlooked. Animations can be used to break down even the most complex concepts into easier to understand information. Text overlays, and the use of lower thirds, provide viewers with visually intriguing data that will not only hammer home key points of interest, but will increase the likelihood for your audience to recall the information later on, too.

As you can see, learning how to create an excellent ELearning instructional video is certainly a task that requires some careful planning in order to achieve the best possible outcome. At Beverly Boy Productions, we can help with the entire production process from early planning to post-production distribution of your ELearning videos. Give us a call to learn more about the next steps and the twenty years of experience that we’ll bring to your project to ensure success! We can’t wait to work with you!