Why interactive video should become a part of your learning strategy
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Innovation is disrupting how we work, communicate, consume, and play. The disruption is experiential, as we are no longer a passive audience that sits back to consume content pushed to us. This has created a population of interactive users—touching, swiping, and tapping our way into discovering the information we need to do a better job or live a better life.
Interactive video offers a compelling alternative to traditional video to engage and educate— one that speaks to your employees’ behaviours.
As consumers, we’ve been able to choose when and how to learn for years. It’s simple. As the learning landscape has evolved, employees and consumers are plugged into technology via multiple devices more than ever before. So, when it comes to learning and information gathering, employees expect the same level of digital accessibility from their employers as they do from the brands they frequent in their personal lives.
The corporate LMS is (nearly) dead, ‘traditional LMSs are no longer supporting modern learning needs’ and learners want their learning experience to be set free.
Technology is now enabling companies to catch up and meet the needs of modern learners, creating the next generation of learning through modern and customisable interactive learning experiences.
If we look at the history of communication techniques and technology, the recent speed of change arrived dramatically fast. I just revisited videos shot on a camera (not a smartphone) of my ten year old son when he was a baby, so that’s a good marker. Within just over his lifespan thus far, the tools to capture and view quality video have gotten so good and so accessible as to make my early films look shoddy. The ease of sharing has created a whole industry of ‘youtubers’ distributing knowledge and opinions, the growth of TikTok is pushing video creation into the mainstream.
Video is becoming the most pervasive form of communication, it brings both context and content making it more effective than any other form of communication for certain purposes, especially learning.
Adding interactivity to video further increases engagement, memorability and speed to any communication process whether its for learning or just informing. In the context of video this interactivity includes capabilities such as navigation, branching, knowledge checks with adaptive branching to help you learn, survey questions, polling and many content elements such as text, graphics, animation and video in video
Interactive video works because it allows instant feedback on the consequence of a choice. By adding choices and interactivity to your video, you invite your employees and consumers to lean forward and participate. This deeper engagement enhances the learning and accelerates behaviour change.
In addition to enhanced engagement, interactive video content is also more likely to sink in. Learners retain data more readily (and remember it for longer) when they’re paying more attention to the content because it’s engaging and relevant.
With interactive video, elearning practitioners can build one experience that speaks to multiple segments or target personas with different levels of information. This leads to learning retention and the ability to build in measurable calls to actions – all of which accelerates behaviour change.
The world is now digital, and employers are facing the reality of recruiting a workforce that has deep familiarity with technology and responds best to employers that demonstrate digital relevance, or the increasing need to create digital content that has genuine meaning and relevance for the intended audience.
And the requirement to continuously learn as our jobs change gives all companies the challenge of how to effectively keep up. An interactive video platform that combines ease of access to content with simple tools for creating interactions and also the security to keep IT/Compliance at ease is a big leap forward for any company’s learning capabilities and thus should play its place in your learning strategy.