Best practices for engaging learners with video in online courses.

With online learning growing consistently over the past decade, today more than one in four learners are enrolled in at least one online course and 31% of corporate training has transitioned to digital onboarding and training.

As education leaders and corporate trainers continue to navigate this new landscape of learning, we begin to search for best practices to engage learners with video. Most are well-aware of the benefits of using video, but struggle to find useful ways to fully engage the learner through video.

1. Assign Student Video Responses

One of the most troublesome tasks for every instructor is verifying that learners know and understand how to perform learning objectives on their own.

Using video response assignments gives the learners the chance to show their learning and instructors to easily verify standards are being met with real learning outcomes. The easiest way to use student responses is through VidGrid’s Student Recording. Even without a dedicated Learning Management System (LMS), an instructor can receive and assign videos to any learner using state-of-the-art guest recording technology.

2. Enable Learner Questions/Feedback to Engage Within a Video

As instructors, we tend to value the learner’s ability to answer our questions to gauge their understanding. What’s probably more important is their ability to ask great questions and in return develop their own thinking and understanding.

One way to do this, is to have a section in your video that welcomes open-ended questions and feedback from the learners. As an instructor, you will get a notification and full report of your learner’s questions.

3. Engaging Learners with Video Quizzes

The core concept of active learning is to help learners process course content at a higher cognitive level. One simple and effective way instructors are doing this is through periodic comprehension checks with integrated in-video quizzing.

Have your video pause and gauge learner’s level of understanding through quiz questions that will show up in the video. Video quizzes can make sure that your learners are engaging all the way until the end of the video.

4. Add In-Video Commenting

Giving learners the ability to interact with the content but also their peers and instructor is crucial. One simple way to accomplish this is through interactive in- video commenting.

This allows learners and or the instructor to ask a question, add a response, or even add an external link that is relevant to the topic at hand. Viewer’s comments will show up in real time, and will live where they are time-stamped.

5. Keep Videos Short

Most instructors are well aware of the benefits of microlearning. For those that aren’t familiar, microlearning is the concept that the highest cognitive retention takes place in short, dynamic bursts.

To really drive ample amounts of retention, it’s ideal to keep all videos as short as possible (3-5 minutes or shorter), this allows your audience to digest and maintain core concepts at higher awareness.

6. Include Video Chapters

Microlearning is not always an option; sometimes we have amazing lectures that need to be shared.

Adding chapters to your lecture gives learners the opportunity to access the curriculum in a way that’s easy to keep the information that is important. By sectioning off keytopics into chapters, learners can easily jump to and from core concepts for effective study purposes and higher retention.

7. Searchable Video Transcripts

Video engagement can come in many ways beyond simple comments and questions. Interactive captions make engaging learners with video super simple. By adding closed captioning to a video, learners with and without disabilities can engage with a video.

Every learner can search within the video transcript, download a copy of the transcript for study purposes, and jump to precise points within a video to find relevant information.

Ready to start engaging learners with video? Sign up for VidGrid today!