Here’s one you can all help me with. When putting together learning materials – particularly aimed at a public sector audience – what’s the best format to use?
More specifically – is there any use in using video? Problems with video in the office include:
- lack of sound cards / speakers / headphones to hear them
- lack of access to video hosting sites
- lack of bandwidth to download them
- …and so on
For a couple of projects I’m looking at putting together learning resources for people about digital “stuff”, and I am leaning towards just writing lots of blog style bits of text with screenshots, rather than going down the screencast or video route.
It makes it chunkable so people can learn in bits if they choose, and of course text and images are a pretty universal, low bandwidth means of content delivery – they will work fine on whatever screen size, and won’t take ages to download.
Plus, by adding a social element, enabling people to talk about the content and discuss it in the context of their own work and projects, that will help embed the learning a little more.
What do people thing?
While video has its uses, I don’t think it’s the be-all, end-all that some people have made it out to be. You mentioned a number of reasons for that, and there are a few others. Like what? How about:
* Searching for content in a video is haphazard at best. Uou need to rely on visual cues and a little luck to get to the information that you want.
* It can be inconvenient to take videos offline.
* Often, text is just faster. A few years ago, it took me two minutes to find some information about my phone in a video. Compare that to about 30 seconds with the phone’s printed guide.
* Not everyone learns visually.