Making Online Training Fun
Posted by anastasia on 01-10-2006I try to keep my Current TV world and Ypulse world pretty separate, but at times, I'm inspired to post about stuff at Current since the network is geared towards young people (18-34). We just launched the last installment of a project I managed called the VC2 Survival Guide. There is an AP story floating around about it that was published yesterday afternoon.
What I think might be relevant to Ypulsers (especially any educators) is to share a bit about the process we went through to create what is basically "training" for beginning video producers (in our demo) but make it not look or feel like "training." I would say the following principles sort guided us in this effort:
- Make it look and feel fun (we were inspired by the retro hipness designs found in such staples as airline safety guides and updated versions of this often used in Chronicle Books' short how-to guides - the design extended to our handy .pdf takeaways. We wanted to infuse humor and levity wherever we could visually)
- Distill, distill, distill (we literally went through reams of curriculum and boiled everthing down to its essence. We wanted each chunk of information to be short and sweet. Our audience does not have the attention span or desire to read through or even watch hours of boring training curriculum)
- Use music, animation and video to communicate (a lot of online training tends to be very text-heavy — even when it is teaching video. Our goal was to use as little as possible - mainly in the .pdfs)
- Celebrities don't hurt (I don't think our celebrity storytellers were a make or break factor in the Survival Guide — BUT, they actually gave some amazingly thoughtful advice and helped generate a bit of press buzz. We tried to use both celebs that we felt our audience related to as well as some older folks they may admire…)
The VC2 Survival Guide is a free resource for anyone to use and a project I can honestly say I'm really proud of.
