Important Considerations when Creating an Interactive E-Learning Video

The interactive video industry is growing rapidly right alongside the e-learning video industry which is projected to reach $375B by 2026. Combined, these two industries have the potential to positively impact millions of learners across a wide array of industries and trades. If you’re thinking about creating an interactive e-learning video, there are some very important considerations that you should make beforehand. 

Ultimately, the success of any interactive e-learning video that you produce is going to be based on your ability to specifically target your instruction to your audience, the interactive elements that you incorporated into your video, and any post production steps you take to monitor analytics and the success of your video content.

At Beverly Boy Productions, we specialize in the production of interactive e-learning video content that can be used in virtually any industry to educate, entertain, and effectively engage learners. If you’ve got an educational video topic in mind, give us a call to learn more about producing an interactive e-learning video that’s right for your audience! We’ll put our two decades of experience to work for you in producing a top quality video for your target audience. 

Targeting Your Instruction to Your Audience

Early in the planning stage of your video, targeting your audience becomes the focus of your content. You must not only have key details about your audience including how they learn and what they are interested in, you must also have an idea of how you can approach an educational topic so that your audience will stick around and engage. All of this requires you to know and understand the audience that you’re trying to reach.

Targeting your instruction to your audience is all about figuring out a specific angle of instruction that is going to connect with your viewers. You must determine where any gaps or lapses in knowledge are on the topic you’re teaching, so that you can define specific points of support to fill those learning gaps in. This will make your video content more useful to your target audience and it will make your audience more likely to appreciate your instruction.

Knowing and understanding your audience is also important because it provides you an opportunity to target your instruction based on:

• Very specific learning objectives and goals. 
• A specific format that your audience is most likely to interact with.
• A set learning style that works for your audience. Some learners are visual learners, others are audible learners. Some learners are kinesthetic learners.
• A target video length that is right for your viewers. The average learners expects an educational video to be less than 20 minutes, but few viewers will stick around more than 6 minutes. Keep this in mind as you product your content.

Taking steps upfront to define what will be most likely to work for your target audience is going to be key to creating successful e-learning video content. Planning is essential!

Interactive Elements to Include in Your Video

When producing an interactive e-learning video, you have a wide variety of potential interactive elements that you can include in your video to engage your audience. Just like in the first step, knowing your audience is vital when you’re planning the interactive experience for your viewers. Naturally some viewers are going to engage or interact better with quizzes and others might interact best with a hotspot. Knowing your audience will help you to define the appropriate interactive needs for your video content.

Consider the following types of interactive elements to incorporate into your interactive e-learning video:

• Add chapters and bookmarks to make long-form video content easy to digest and safe.
• Add clickable call-to-action elements to encourage your viewer to download additional content or to visit additional pages.
• Use quizzes to reinforce content at the end of a lesson or during a lesson.
• Incorporate 360° video views to provide users access to vie entire areas from all directions and to choose unique scenarios.
• Include branches for scenarios based training that allows students to choose different paths and to see the outcomes of their decisions.

Certainly, interactive e-learning videos can include a variety of different elements that can reinforce student learning and increase engagement. As the content creator, your job is to define the types of interactive elements that are potentially most valuable for your audience and to include those in the content that you create.

Post-Production Monitoring of Video Success 

Another important consideration when you’re creating interactive e-learning video content is post-production monitoring of your videos for success.  It’s very important to understand that your interactive e-learning video content production doesn’t end when you’ve produced your video. It ends after you’ve distributed your video content and analyzed the success of your video.

Determining the success of your interactive e-learning video is very much about incorporating the use of analytics into your course. Think about the following:

• Tracking how long your students are engaging in your video content.
• Incorporating end-of-video quizzes to ensure student engagement to the very end.
• Tracking total video views to monitor overall interest in your video content.
• Tracking interactive elements within your video to determine interest.

Overall, as you make these and other considerations in the process of creating an interactive e-learning video you’re going to find that you’re more prepared, and more successful, in the long run.