Video and its effectiveness, written for Skylark Media Group

People learn in many different ways and no two people absorb information in the same way. We all know the three main learning patterns; visual, audio and kinesthetic and most people know what style suits them. Around 60% of people are visual learners – they prefer to see how to do things rather than just talk about them. Visual learners prefer to watch demonstrations and will often get a lot out of video instruction.

In a business training video, the main objective is to get the viewer, which could be a prospective employee, current employee or customer to understand and retain as much information as possible. With the majority of us being visual learners there appears to be a call for more interactive learning.

A visual learner at work

In her blog post ‘The Human Factor: Instructing from a Learner’s Perspective’ , Learning Solutions Magazine author, Mary Arnold, says, “The world of online learning still largely consists of page-turners created for compliance training. And, for the most part, the learners I talk to often describe their online training experiences as boring or aggravating, and not very educational.  It’s a reasonable reaction.”

“Even though learning professionals know that human brains aren’t designed to download large bodies of abstract, detailed information in a short time, page-turners often require learners to demonstrate just that skill. Interactive elements, which are much more appropriate teaching tools, considering what we know about how we learn, are relatively under-represented; even now that online learning is a well-established field.”

Many mistakes are made when it comes to e-learning methods. Often companies will think that because a training programme is on a screen as opposed to somebody standing in-front of the new recruits, the viewer will automatically retain everything that appears in-front of them. This is not the case. If a viewer is generally a visual learner, this will still be relevant in an e-learning method.

Psychologists and educators have found that retention of information three days after a presentation or meeting is six times greater when the information is presented both visually and orally rather than by spoken word alone.

So with the majority of people learning more from being shown instructions, it appears as though video and learning go hand-in-hand.