Death by video?

We live in the multimedia age. One unfortunate Miss Teen USA contestant massacres a response to a question in a beauty pageant (while mentioning my country of birth) and EVERYONE watches it on Youtube – with subtitle included.

Surely given the massive amount of video that people now have access to on their cell phones, smart phones, PDA's, internet, TV, TiVO etc it makes logical sense to bombard people with video in training programs, right?

I am constantly amazed at the number of customers who want video in their training programs. The reason that I am amazed is because when I ask them why video is needed they look at me with blank stares. Apparently it is so obvious that no explanation is needed. Don't get me wrong many of our training programs use video elements/segments but these are tied directly to the objectives of the program.

So this begs the question - can a training program suffer from death by video? Surely having a video training program is much better than having just text on screen. I would say - maybe. Having the talking head video on screen for 30 minutes is just as boring as the text based page turner. Yes, I did say boring. Fact is people are busy and they want something that engages and entertains them. This is best achieved by use a combination of eLearning elements such as text, interactive graphics, audio and video. The last two elements may be limited based on your budget, time frame, deployment method etc.

Back to video. Using video is a great idea but use it in limited amounts to meet your learning objectives. What are users going to get out of the video? Why do they need to see the video? Does the video have graphics included, multiple narrators/actors i.e. will it engage the user? If you can adequately answer these questions then you should use video. The best idea is to split any video that is longer than 3-5 minutes into separate learning segments. Contemporary business people share one characteristic with gold fish, their concentration span is VERY short. This means you have to keep them hooked and using video can be a great way to achieve this.

Just make sure that your training program doesn't suffer a quick and horrible death by video.