Research has found that expert-produced training videos provide faster training, increased usage, flexibility, and more consistently trained staff.
Selecting the correct training video producer is extremely important to the success of your training video.
Video production houses often offer a full range of video production services, from television commercials, filming seminars and live events, to corporate video production and training videos. They can be divided into three categories: commercials, live corporations, or instructional design producers.
For most training situations, instructional design producer-writers are best at producing video-enhanced training sessions. These producers also have more experience working with detailed training materials.
The best way to assess whether the training video company is producing training videos from an instructional design perspective is to review their work and ask the following questions:
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- Is the level of information easy to understand? Could a school-age student pick up the messages easily?
- Is the script written in a way that appeals? Or do you feel like a bossy teacher tells you to do something instead of being shown in a friendly way?
- How was the rhythm or the video? Was it correct, too slow or fast?
- Was the content presented in a logical and easy-to-follow sequence?
- Was new material introduced before you could fully absorb the old information?
Production
- Was the work environment relevant? Was it trying to be everything for a variety of industries or had it been customized for a company?
- Were the characters and situations shown realistically?
- Were the desired behaviors modeled in a way that employees can copy?
- Were there things going on in the background that distracted you from learning (ex: forklift hitting a pole)?
- Were the elements of a process clearly shown so that you could understand what they were referring to? (ex: when talking about, say, a “stop” button was displayed on a machine, so you would know what it looked like).
- Were there too many special effects or graphics that diverted attention from the messages, thus reducing the effectiveness of the show?
- Were titles used to reinforce important points that allow staff to remember and absorb important information?
- If you were an employee of this company, how would you feel about them? Excited to work for them, comfortable with the new process, or feeling like they don’t really care about your staff?
- Was employee knowledge assessed after watching a video to increase mental effort and thus improve motivation and understanding?
By keeping these questions in mind when reviewing the training videos, you can quickly assess how effective the training video will be as an educational tool.
This will allow you to choose the right video production provider instead of developing an employee training video that will end up collecting dust on your shelf.