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Online Learning

6 Dimensions for More Effective Online Instructional Videos

Quality instructional videos require a balance of content, design, teaching style and more. Here are six factors to consider.

When I first started my career as a senior instructional designer for Microsoft's startup E-Commerce Division 25 years ago, there were no reliable standards of quality for online instruction or courseware. The fact that one could create any type of learning product at all that functioned without crashing on the crude online platforms then available was still considered a minor miracle. Anyone who could legitimately claim the slimmest degree of expertise in any aspect of online learning design, or had even remotely related skills, was likely to have plenty of interviews and more than enough job offers.

Today, the tools of the online instructional design trade are far easier to work with, and support in using them infinitely more available. Companies are no longer impressed that an instructional design job applicant can create online materials quickly using a set of industry-standard software applications. They are looking for professionals who can put together lean, attractive and highly effective online courseware — and have portfolios to prove it. Today's designers need to know what separates a merely adequate product from the totally awesome.

Having trained more than 300 new instructional designers in the Masters of Education program in Instructional Design and Technology at West Texas A&M University in recent years, I know my students would love a recipe book with precise quantities for all the listed ingredients. Specific values for color relations, the optimum number of view changes per minute, the perfect number of bullet points on a summary graphic, would all be most welcome. But designing online instruction is still as much art as science and cannot be reduced to a notebook of formulas. That is a good thing. It means someone who has developed an intuitive creative sense about what works best can still distance themselves in quality from those who are merely following artificial design rules and arbitrary, often outdated, institutional standards. It is still possible to stand out from the pack.

In a sense, it's a lot like photography. A photographer needs to be aware of compositional balance, white balance, f-stop and many other technical factors that can be adjusted either in the camera or in post-production. There are no "perfect settings" for any of these, as it always depends on what the photographer is trying to accomplish in the moment. Similarly, there are design factors that the instructional designer of online courseware must keep in mind and consciously balance. Here are six dimensions that must be well tuned for a successful online instructional video project.

1) Sound-to-Silence Balance

Sound-to-silence balance is the ratio of talk to empty space on the soundtrack of your video. Tools like Camtasia and Captivate show the soundtrack as a display of the visible waveforms, which makes it easy to see this balance at a glance without listening to the content itself.

Beginning instructional design students often try to record their videos from sketchy outlines or vague, fragmentary scripts. They are not quite "winging it" — but are not fully prepared either. Turning such scripts into training content requires a lot of thinking on one's feet and choosing specific words during the recording process, which results in many pauses of varying length. Too many such pauses can make your work sound tentative, unauthoritative and boring.

Even with a solid script or a strong outline of detailed talking points to take into a recording session, I find that about 40 percent of my first-take soundtrack ends up on the virtual cutting room floor. When I need to sound extremely confident and fully professional, the delete key is my best friend.