You can explain anything

Explainer videos for complex subjects?

I also know that it’s sometimes hard to dumb things down. Complex subjects have a whole lexicon of buzzwords and their own alphabet soup to go with it. It’s often easier, especially when converting existing training, to scoop up the current material make it the script and be done.

I don’t think laziness is the cause of this current trend. I think it’s more systemic than that. Basically, it seems that we’re getting a bit bored. Storyline and other tools have made eLearning ubiquitous, so much so that many modules look almost the same even if they are from different sources. Not every company wants a new design for each course and a cool looking player to go with it.

Just because something is ubiquitous does not make it inherently bad. We should all focus on sticking to the emerging best practices for eLearning and challenge ourselves to do the hard work of making the content suitable for the medium, especially “keep it simple.”

Users don’t want to know how smart we are or how complicated we can make it.

Just a thought!

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It’s actually super simple and once you sort it out the value of the Unity platform increases significantly.

Our project started with the following requirements:

1. 1. Engaging graphics and environment
   2. Good feedback to the user throughout the module
   3. Emit progress data to xAPI and SCORM and Mysql
   4. Track user mistakes
   5. Provide video in the simulation as a help resource
   6. Allow for a rules-based coach system to react to learner actions
   7. Conduct assessments at the end of the simulation

The Unity platform is fantastically rich, but not designed for this kind of project unless you want it to chug along like a 1980’s pc.

After some experimentation we developed the following simple approach:

The really big deal here is that Unity gets a break and has to do very little work to emit the data. The off-board data manager is responsible for onward transmission and reformats the data for the target system or systems. It also broadcasts real-time information and passes data to an external rules engine that can detect situations that require intervention and then send a signal to Unity to react to the user.

Step through the slides and you can see some of the features. Most notably the last slide is what was appearing on a browser received from the pusher. Below is a brief video of the environment.

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You keep reading that video gives high ROI, but you may not be all that comfortable with the technical side of things (leveraging BYOD, attention span data, structuring video for retention, etc.), and if you aren’t a geek, you may feel quite challenged.

Take heart. Your skills and experience are as valuable as ever. In recent posts, I’ve tried to boil down the information overload into bite-sized, actionable pieces. I’ve examined why video is one of the strongest training tools available, and how it functions to enable adult learning. Today, I’d like to focus on how to make the paradigm shift from in-person training to video-based learning.

Video-based learning employs a different learning style than in-person teaching, so it makes sense that the presenter/curriculum developer needs to approach it in a different way to get the best use from it.

Is video the best format for what I need to teach?

The first step in developing training is to match the presentation style to the material. Video is an incredibly powerful teaching tool—for some forms of training. If you want to teach something that can be concentrated and summarized, video is your tool of choice. Let’s look at some examples.

You work for an international fast food corporation, and you need to teach people all over the world a set of discrete steps to preparing a new menu offering. Video saves the day: you can create the same script in many different languages, roll it out simultaneously around the globe with the push of a button, and play it for employees right in the kitchen, as many times as they need to see it.

You need to teach people subject matter that requires significant background knowledge and involves internalizing a flow chart of decision-making. Video can play a significant role in parts of that process, but you’ll also need printed material and in-person resourcing.

You need to teach someone an involved skill like watch repair. While video might supply some valuable background information, the most important part of your training will be hands-on practice with a mentor.

Give up control

The most significant change in this paradigm shift is that the control of the training process shifts from the trainer to the training consumer. Your planning process begins with the employee, and how to present information in the best way for he or she to access, consume, assimilate, retain, and implement. How can you best serve the person you are trying to teach?

Though it certainly makes sense in terms of effective teaching, this is a big change in your thinking. You must reconsider the steps of information delivery, from concept and delivery through evaluation.

Making the transition

Here are some concrete things you can do to make this paradigm shift.

• Focus on the benefits video and animation provide, rather than feeling overwhelmed by working in a medium with which you are unfamiliar. Find professional support that makes you comfortable and confident.
• Make sure your content is appropriate for video presentation.
• Work in small, bite-sized chunks of information.
• Remember that video is a highly visual medium where you can leverage both hearing and seeing at the same time. Not everything has to be said and not everything has to be seen.
• Create training that has a beginning, middle, and end, allowing the viewer to understand where they are in the process.
• Retain the proven educational approach: tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and summarize what you told them.
• Think more broadly than content. Incorporate assessments, quizzes, and evaluations as part of the process. Interactive elements help increase retention, reflection, and confidence in the material learned.
• Write the content to be spoken, not read. Be clear on the feeling and corporate identity you want the video to project. Don’t be afraid to use humor. This helps avoid stuffy, boring voice-over narration.
• Budget for good production value so your training doesn’t feel cheesy, sound bad, or look terrible. Project the quality you want your employees to achieve.

Too good to ignore

There is no doubt that video and animation have great value in the world of training. It respects adult learners, gives them the ability to control their learning pace, andprovides measurable ROI.

In short, it’s too good an opportunity to ignore. It is a different medium than the in-person training we relied on for many generations, and that does require a shift in how we think about and prepare curriculum. The good news is, you don’t have to know it all. We will bring the technical knowledge to match your subject-matter expertise, forging a partnership to benefit everyone involved. It might even be fun.
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So what could go wrong?

As we do projects for companies, we begin to see trends and have a chance to see how projects work out in terms of actual courses in the field. It is surprising many of the companies that we work with are making the same mistakes and avoidable errors that can lead to both poor training performance and a sense of disappointment among the trainers.

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained – Walt Disney Company

Let me break down the common issues

Some very simple mistakes are avoidable:

Taking the easy way out – nobody likes to have to redo the course they spent a long time polishing. Moving old content to a new medium often means that the content needs to be radically altered to fit (e.g. that eight-hour course of several hundred slides doesn’t quite fit into five-minute modules).

What happens is the training staff try to massage the material into an informational video with a minimum of changes. This leads to incredibly turgid, dry, text-based animations that frankly don’t deserve to be called animations and really could’ve stayed in PowerPoint.

The solution – leverage the agency or production company that you are working with and allow them to re-visualize your content for the medium. It is a different way of developing good content. We focus on what you’re trying to communicate and then mapping that onto the wide range of ways of visualizing information that animation and video offer.

Losing sight of the audience – text is universal. No matter what demographic you are after, text-is-text, bullets-are-bullets. But when it comes to visuals there’s both an opportunity and a risk. If your audience is made up of millennials for example, you want to use images and styles that will resonate with them. If you’re working with baby boomers then a wholly, different style applies. Get it wrong and your audience will assume that the content is boring or not for them because they can’t identify the style.

The solution – ensure that the organization you’re working with is prepared to create samples of their content design so that you can “focus group” it, even if just informally, with your intended audience.

It’s also crucial to ensure a high level of ethnic diversity among the characters in your animation or video to make sure that you can connect with the broadest possible audience among your intended demographic.

Not being prepared to entertain – training is serious stuff right? Great training does three things, it engages, entertains and educates – in that order. Being afraid of entertaining is a common problem. Organizations worry that the training will not be taken seriously and that precious training time will be wasted on something that is “light and fluffy.” Obviously, you have to match your organization’s tolerance for less than deadly serious materials. It is true that if you entertain a learner, they remain engaged and learn far more than if you stick to dry serious content. It doesn’t have to be slapstick; it just has to be entertaining.

The solution – trust in the experience of your production company. Describe to them your corporate culture, detail your tolerance for less than serious training and look for examples online that you think your audience would enjoy within your tolerance.

But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it’s carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful And Damned

How to avoid these pitfalls

We’re going through a period of transition, companies and organizations are not as expert at digital content as their production companies. That will change over time, and we have already see an increasing level of knowledge that allows us to work collaboratively with internal groups to develop content.

For those new to using these tools to develop training it’s important to lean on your production company and take advantage of the experiences they have had with other organizations.

Finally, be prepared to give up on some of the time-honored traditions and workflows that have worked in the past. It is a new age, which for some things mean starting over, but it also provides an opportunity to develop compelling and effective training content that engages entertains and educates – and that’s what we all want.

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Animated video has proven to be a highly effective way to communicate abstract or practical information. Thanks to technology, it’s now much more affordable and provides good ROI.

It’s versatile and imaginative, allowing viewers to instantly enter an entire world, ready and willing to absorb the information you want to present.

Let’s look at some questions that make the process more likely to be successful.

First three key steps:

In some ways, I feel like the strength of animation is in its simplicity and caricature, and in reduction. It’s like an Al Hirschfeld caricature, where he’ll use, like, three lines, and he’ll capture the likeness of someone so strongly that it looks more like them than a photograph. I think animation has that same power of reduction. — Pete Docter

Start with an overview of your project.

What’s the purpose of your video? How will you measure its success?

Animation is not good for everything

Characters are expensive and time-consuming to create

An animation is best for explaining practical things in terms of objects, such as software technology or how things work.  It is less appropriate for subjects involving humans, such as HR training videos, because it’s still expensive and time-consuming to make animated characters.

Who is its target audience, and what tone is appropriate for them?

Clearly identifying a target audience is crucial to your success. It determines the flavor: fun, serious, classy, rustic, friendly, or formal. That tone, in turn, impacts every design element, from scripts and characters to colors, motion, and narration.
What does it sell or teach, and what are the most important points to get across?

As painful as it may be, you must boil content down to the essence of your message. A lot has to happen in a three-minute video: set the scene in a believable animated world; represent your company accurately and creatively; present your topic (or the problem you’re solving); offer your solution and how it works, presented so simply people can remember it; and a call to action. That’s a lot, and if it isn’t done well, your video is a muddle—and so is your message.

7 Other important considerations

1. Good animation demands a very distinct story arc. You are creating an artificial world in a very short amount of time, so you need to present a clear path—a beginning, middle and end—to keep your viewers oriented.

2. The voiceover’s job is to complement, support, and give depth to the visual story. If it simply repeats, you’ve lost the power of video and created redundant material that may appear condescending to your audience.

3. Characters, whether they are animated boxes or foxes, must be appropriately and culturally diverse. This includes language, tone, and other factors.

4. Research indicates a clear limit to how long someone can watch an animation without their attention drifting. Three minutes or under is ideal.

5. Section 508 compliance is now almost mandatory for organizations of any size. How will you make your video accessible to audiences of varying ability? Do you need closed captioning, a special design for viewers with vision issues or the hard of hearing?

6. With BYOD becoming very popular, you need to consider how your video will play on a variety of screens. A font size appropriate for a laptop screen may disappear on a phone. What technologies are your target viewers likely to use?

7. How do you want to represent your organization? Naturally, you’ll use your logo, color scheme, and other branding identifiers. But be aware that once online, your video is forever. Whether it’s an advertisement or a training video, make sure you like what the quality, professionalism, and content say about your company.

One example. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Last year we worked with a large hardware manufacturer, who wanted a series of technical training animations. What seemed to be an ideal project, soon became a nightmare, as we began to realize that animation was being used to avoid planning and careful consideration of the content.

Many training departments are adept at taking the “manual” for a module and turning it into a PowerPoint. For face-to-face training with unlimited time, that’s fine, for an animation of a few minutes length, this technique tends to fail.

As we struggled to align what animation could do with our client’s thoughts, I discovered an important point. Not everyone can or is willing to take a long-form document, be it training or marketing and boil it down to its essence. This shortcoming is not apparent when a project starts with new material but becomes evident when it’s an existing course that needs boiling down.

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation. — Walt Disney

SME’s are all the rage. Organizations have trainers that rely on subject matter experts to provide the content for training. The problem is that left alone SMEs naturally want to include every detail and nuance of their subject.

In this case, their approach created a situation where a significant amount of content was being shoehorned into an inappropriately small container.

Once we all recognized what was happening a “discovery” session with the SME, trainer and ourselves, lead to a rapid culling of extraneous material and the development of an outline that was good for animation and yet retained the essential training information.

Everyone was happy.

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The secret of combining animations, emotions, and learning is pretty simple. If you can connect with your audience in any emotional way—for example, amusement, anger, or pleasure—you open up a more effective channel to learning and comprehension.

The other day, a friend amazed me by remembering the name a high-school teacher from decades before. “Yeah, Mrs. Bechelstrom,” she said. “She really cared about me. I’d work my fanny off for her.”

We know that if you connect on an emotional level with another person, you communicate more effectively with them. This applies in particular in the case of online learning, which, by its very nature, tends to be impersonal. It can be greatly enhanced by including an emotional dimension.

Of course, there are limits. When it comes to things such as learning about a product or understanding a new 401(k) policy, overt emotion isn’t appropriate. But such is the beauty of video: no matter what the subject, you can make an emotional connection with the use of graphics, music, and voice-over, and your subject matter will be more readily absorbed by anyone watching.

Adding emotion, excitement or just plain entertainment makes information easily digestible. — James Ringrose

An excellent example of leveraging attitude through an animation video is the “Ford Tough” series with Dennis Leary. These advertisements are aimed squarely at a testosterone-soaked, hard-boiled working man with a cynical and somewhat angry outlook on life. The early versions of these ads were seen as being really “in your face” and raised quite a few eyebrows. However, they proved to be very successful; a toned-down version of the series continued for some time.

Through the aggressive use of cynicism and masculine bravado, Ford achieved a visceral connection with the truck-driving community. You either loved the ad, or it flew right over your head because you were unable to identify with the sentiments (emotions) they implied. This, in an environment where most vehicle ads show happy families (calling on another strong emotional thread) with puppies.

So the things to remember with animation videos are:

1. Understand your audience and what drives them emotionally. Are they emotionally engaged with the subject? Is there an obvious emotional connection? For example, one rather cynical trend we see these days is selling Alzheimer’s pharmaceuticals to baby boomers through the use of readily identifiable emotional connections with aging parents.

2. Develop your animation video to reach your viewer via emotion that is then combined with the intended message. This enforces the message rather than distracting the viewer.

3. Balance the use of emotion or attitude with the overall goal of teaching your viewer something.  Use emotions to enhance communication, not to overwhelm the subject. You don’t want your viewer sobbing with grief or howling with laughter instead of absorbing the intended message.

Using animation videos for business and e-learning is a fairly new subject. There’s much to be learned about the capabilities and effectiveness of this medium. The good news is that learners enjoy animations. They delight in those that provide something more than a predictable, bland representation of the subject matter. What we as producers owe them is a respectful use of their emotional responses in order to help them learn the subject.

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More specifically in terms of our series on the effectiveness of using video in training, how can you measure ROI for videos?

There can be no palpable excuse for not measuring the return on training investment. If it’s a black hole in your business then push all your trainers into it and start over. — Anon

If you want to evaluate the success of your sales department, it’s fairly straightforward. A little data and a spreadsheet assures you that your salespeople are hitting the mark (or not). Determining ROI on video training is a little more ambiguous, but there are some clear indicators that can help evaluate the performance of your video.
In the past, it was tougher; metric-gathering systems for video and animation were pretty immature, especially when used on BYOD devices. But recent developments in the quality of learning management systems have made it possible to gather very fined-grained metrics as training is consumed online. These days, there is no reason why you should not know as much about the effect of video training as you would from conventional classroom instruction.

Know what success looks like before you start

Experts agree that to be able to trust metrics after training, you must know what you’ll test for as you create it. First come goals, objectives, and deciding what success will mean. You are providing this training to solve a problem. What do you expect to happen as a result of it, and how will that solution be measured?

For instance, one of our larger corporate customers is very dependent on measuring customer satisfaction as a key performance indicator of their individual locations. Our task was to train their employees in areas that were identified as causing lower customer satisfaction.
We developed a monthly magazine-style training video that was intended to both entertain and educate. The content of the video was directly aimed at addressing the specific customer satisfaction issues that had been identified in the customer satisfaction measurement. As we normally do we carefully measured the take-up rate of the video and the amount of time spent watching as well as geographic locations and time of day. The data measurement was achieved using basic Google analytics and some custom tools.

In parallel with the training, our client remeasured customer satisfaction before its release, during its release and subsequently. It was gratifying to see how customer satisfaction for specific issues improved significantly and in subsequent measurements remained higher than prior training.

On some occasions, the training video had little impact on customer satisfaction. However, because we were able to identify that this was the case we could remake the video taking a different approach for the next video magazine.

Of course not every subject can be adequately addressed by a BYOD training video. What is true is that it’s possible to identify these intransigent or difficult issues as a result of the measurement process. This data allows the training group to develop a different strategy to address the problem.

There is nothing unusual about the approach we took, but what we were able to do was accurately connect the dollars spent on the training materials with the outcome. This is especially exciting as the measurement data is derived from free tools and adds little to the cost of the project.

One place to begin is to listen to the employees you want to train. They, more than anyone, know what they need to learn and how that training will impact the organization and its customers. Interviews and surveys, as well as pre- and post-testing can provide a wealth of information. There are also several software programs designed to track employee learning progress.

Technology has many advantages, but there are also simple ways to observe the effectiveness of training. Can your recently trained employee teach a co-worker what they learned? This helps them retain the instruction and grow more confident in it, as well as spreading the wealth of information.

More technical metrics and how they work

As an understanding of how video works has increased, the use of assessments, quizzes, and interactive measurement points have become more effective.

90% of the data you collect will never be actionable or even helpful. (I made that up because I can’t actually measure it.) — Albert Einstein

When your video training includes a pre-course assessment and a post-course quiz, you can instantly see data concerning the rate of comprehension and knowledge. Another assessment one month later tells you about retention. The variety of methods to measure such criteria are immense and creative. One of my favorite examples is running simple contests and quizzes based on video content. These require the viewer to note certain items or events during the video. Whether or not a prize is offered, the quiz process seems to improve retention significantly. It typically has the benefit of broadening viewership.

Many organizations establish Key Performance Indicators—measurable values that indicate success. A company might develop an online training to address a specific KPI, and then measure the impact post-training. Several of our clients can predict impacts from their training in this way, and see if post-training evaluation—whether online, observed behaviorally on the job, or gathered in other ways such as customer surveys—match their expectations and deliver ROI.

We can help

The days of taking an expensive shot in the dark with your employee education budget are gone! However, deciding on what training success looks like, how to measure it, and how to interpret that data requires technical expertise. We keep our fingers on the pulse of this industry, and we can help you create a video training program that will gather the data you need for clear evaluation.

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Example of this style used for fund raising Short or “mini” documentaries have been the stock-in-trade of the non profit and fund raising community for years. If you are going to ask for money then you have to tell a good story, connect emotionally and then ask. It’s an effective formula that we use often.

How can that help businesses? Well the answer turns out to be, that the effectiveness of storytelling makes it worth considering for business content and training. A number of recent studies and surveys reveal that the human mind is pretty much made for story telling. Stories reach a different part of the brain from normal “business” videos and are absorbed in a different, and more effective, way.

The Pacific Standard recently had a great article: “Your Brain on Story” – which you can read here. To quote the article and Ira Glass:

“The power of anecdote is so great that it has a momentum in and of itself.” Ira Glass contends, “no matter how boring the facts are,” with a well-told story, “you feel inherently as if you are on a train that has a destination.”

There’s no subject that cannot be told this way Real Cool Productions both enjoys making, and believes in, the effectiveness of this technique. We approach this type of work from a somewhat different angle than a regular corporate video. The goal here is to find the story and build a connection to your audience. This is a powerful approach that makes is easier to digest your message and is more likely to elicit the response you are seeking. They are also less exacting to make for you, your staff and others involved. We don’t have to rely upon exact verbiage, but rather use the narrative to carry the facts we want to convey.

You can make a video that repeats your key messages, crams in as many facts and is branded over and over again. Or you can try this approach and befriend and engage you audience rather than hard sell them. Your prospects and customers value their time and are allowing you to use some of it. It’s your responsibility to make that experience both good for them and worthwhile for your organization.

Please ask us about this technique and allow is to describe how it works in more detail. We would be delighted to show you how this works. Please request a free video assessment for more details, examples and a discussion about how to implement these techniques for your next project.

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As someone who wants his employees well trained and knows all too well how easy it is to waste training dollars, John is keen to capitalize on his wake-up call. To deliver effective training, the bottom line is knowing how to engage adult learners, so that they apply, as well as retain, the knowledge you want them to gain.

Engaging your audience
The mobile revolution is changing the way your audience learns. Gone are the days when your whole workforce filed into an auditorium, or you flew people to a classroom for day-long or week-long intensives.

• Modern learners are mobile learners. They want the content in their hands—tablet or phone—so they can learn on the go, using small increments of time that might otherwise be idle. E-learning focuses on bite-sized pieces of information, so a learner can complete it on the subway ride home, or waiting for a child’s recital to begin.

• They prefer their own devices. Why spend time navigating a new Learning Management System when you can pull course content up in a mobile-friendly browser or application?

• Adult learners want to manage their own learning. They require flexibility in what, when, and how they learn. They’re used to turning to videos for every-day, on-the-spot information needs; it’s a familiar learning style they enjoy.

What John didn’t understand was that this was good news for him. “Bring your own device,” or BYOD training, offers management huge advantages.

• BYOD has a much lower cost per seat and a much broader reach, since virtually everyone has access to a device that can display the training.

• The cost per employee is significantly less than shipping personnel and materials for conventional training.

• E-training is very flexible. Unlike printed materials, it can be modified right up to the delivery date, and it can be archived for future employment.

• BYOD is also flexible in its use. Rather than being used once, in a stand-alone training event, it’s consulted throughout the workplace. For instance, BYOD makes near-bedside use in the medical industry possible, as practitioners refresh on a procedure or medication.

• It delivers consistent information in a timely fashion, whether throughout a facility or across the globe, in whatever languages are required.

• The average screen size has grown, and the quality of those screens has improved. The bandwidth available on most systems provide for very high quality imagery.

• Mobile apps are improving how we monitor learning and skill progression daily. Improved analytics mean you can monitor which learner has completed which parts of the training. Pre- and post-testing can measure comprehension, retention, and even how well they are implementing new knowledge.

• All of this data also helps management determine ROI and adjust training as necessary.

• By meeting the needs of your learners, you are leveraging their time, their equipment, their effectiveness, and their satisfaction.

According to eLearningIndustry.com, eLearning courses are expected to grow by 59% in 2016. Coaching by external practitioners is expected to fall by 25% over the next two years, while formal education courses and external workshops are also anticipated to decline.

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Another good reason for not developing the actual content in-house relates to risk and resources. Most in-house productions are done by one person which implies a single point of failure and a single resource that can easily be overwhelmed and lead to missed deadlines. With our team of animators, we can flex our resources to put multiple animators on a single project. We have a workflow and process designed to enable shared and collaborative development, much in the same way a software company uses a team to develop a product.

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