26 Designing audio-visual assets

Video and audio can enhance the appeal of your course, helping engage learners and convey ideas in a compelling and more personal way. Animations can help you to explain and show concepts that might otherwise be hard to convey in a static medium.

If you have access to a team able to create video and animation to support the learning in your course, make the most of their skills to enhance the learning experience you are creating. During the design phase, learning designers and videographers can advise on the best way to ensure that the use of audio-visual material is pedagogically justified and enhances the learner experience.

There are five key recommendations for including video within your course.

    1. Consider the best delivery format

Video is time-consuming and costly to produce, so you should only use video where it is pedagogically justified. Conveying information that would be delivered during an in-person lecture isn’t the most effective way of communicating the same information online.

Courses making use of videos can be successful, but watching video can also be a passive experience and there may be better ways to engage your learners. Consider whether audio would work as well. For example, a podcast format might offer a livelier way of presenting your content.

    2. Plan out production activity

As with the design of the course itself, time spent planning a filming session is rarely wasted. Drafting video scripts well in advance of the filming date gives you the opportunity to rehearse, time your delivery and consider what additional visuals (also known as ‘B-roll’) you might include to help illustrate what you are saying. Scripting what you plan to say will enable you to plan effectively and share your ideas with the team responsible for filming so that they can support you in making the most of the medium.

You can find an example script used to support filming at Leeds in Appendix 6: Video Script.

    3.  Make the video part of the narrative

Avoid presenting the video in isolation. Instead, you should provide learners with other ways to engage with its content. For example, you could include a related activity which triggers deeper thinking and engagement for learners.

Consider asking reflective questions or developing the ideas further in the material that accompanies your video. Combining video with specific tasks that the learner undertakes can help to embed and clarify the ideas introduced.

4.  Keep videos short

Research shows that four to six minutes is the optimal length for an educational video.[1] Any longer and learners become disengaged, with detrimental effects on their learning and completion of the course itself. If you have lots to cover, consider alternative ways of presenting this e.g. as text, separate videos or podcasts, or by asking learners to investigate and find information themselves.

Long videos are often not watched in full, leading to low engagement and completion rates. After six or seven minutes, learners are more likely to lose focus, stop paying attention and skip ahead (or worse, close their browser tab and end their learning session completely). If your video script is longer than this, consider whether everything you have included is necessary. If it is, find a way to chunk it up thematically and make it available in several shorter videos.

5.  Consider all learners on your course

For every video, it’s necessary to provide subtitles and a transcript. Not only does this support learners who are hearing impaired, it also means learners can access the video in noisy environments or continue to access the key ideas it communicates if bandwidth prevents them from watching the video itself.

A wealth of research exists about the impact of video in online courses. Richard Mayer provides some useful, evidence-based pointers when including video within Open courses.[1]