As video professionals, most of us engage with video-based educational content in one of two ways. We might learn from video tutorials, and we might be engaged in making educational videos ourselves — to teach video-related tasks or anything else. But is this the best way to learn? And what effect have YouTube and social media sites had on how students learn today?

I should be up front — as an educator, I have skin in this game. I teach classes in person, I create paid video content, I sometimes make free YouTube videos, I speak at conferences, and I’ve written a lot of articles for websites and a book. But I like change. So what are we in for? Let’s take a look back first.

Old ways of learning

When I was at high school (late-ish last millennium) computers were a new toy for geeks to play with. As one of those geeks, I typed my assignments into my Apple II clone and printed them out on a dot matrix printer, but most other students were writing by hand. Teachers spoke at the front of the class, wrote on blackboard or used overhead projectors, handed out mimeographed purple copies of what we needed to learn, and nearly everything was hand-made. Textbooks and encyclopedias had all the answers, so we read, we talked, we thought, and wrote things down.

At university, most presentations from teachers and students were on overhead projector film, and their notes could only be copied in the special resource room of the library. We were assigned textbooks, attended lectures and tutorials, took exams, and wrote assignments. Assessment was mostly digital, but learning was still by listening in person or by reading, and in many colleges and universities it still is. Even in an Information Technology degree, not all students had their own computers, and if you wanted help online, you would ask in a Usenet newsgroup and hope someone helpful got back to you.

In the late 1990s I began teaching small groups in person for a training organization, writing my own course material and running classes for professionals to learn Flash and Director. Teaching small classes in-person has a few key benefits that other forms of training don’t: it’s hands-on, students can ask the teacher for help when they get stuck, and students can help one another. It’s a great way to learn, and still an option today, but it’s obviously more expensive than a DIY alternative.

Fun as that was, I was hired by students from my first class, and moved into creating multimedia CD-ROMs to teach small vehicle maintenance, using short, self-paced videos. Video-based education, even back then, could absolutely replace at least some in-person training, and this shift towards cheaper, asynchronous learning  — that is, on your own schedule without a teacher present — has since accelerated.

Learn on your own

Around 2004, when I was teaching at university, things had changed further. Lectures were delivered from laptops now. Tutorials were hands-on, with every student on a computer at once, but lectures were being recorded and could be watched asynchronously. The web had grown up, and was a place you could ask for help. Labs of Macs running Final Cut Pro let about 90 Communication Design students edit their own music videos, while (bizarrely) the Film students in the building next door had just four Avid suites and had to sit with an editor to complete their work. I’m quite sure my students learned more about editing by getting their hands dirty than the film students did by acting as a director.

In the following years, learning became more liberated from teaching institutions. While you still need to go to university for a degree, or to a technical college for an industry qualification, it’s now far easier to learn the same skills completely independently, on your own time. There will still be a place for these institutions as long as the qualifications they deliver are valued, and in today’s competitive environment, institutions remain important.

Teaching soft skills through video

It wasn’t long ago that employees would have to do a fire safety induction as an all-hands in-person meeting. Now, it’s more likely to be a self-paced video with online questions to validate learning — and honestly, this is probably a preferred option for many people. If you need to make videos like this, here are a few tips:

• Plan well, and engage closely with an educator and a subject matter expert.
• Experts can sometimes struggle to put themselves in the position of a novice, so be that novice. Speak up if you can see the potential for misunderstanding, or have questions that aren’t being answered.
• Show more, talk less.
• Use as few words as you can.
• Follow the approved script.
• To solidify learning, recap a video’s message at the start and end.

Video is also a key way in which we, as video and creative professionals, are learning the skills we need to do our ever-changing jobs. New users need core skills, and experienced users need to know how to use new software and gear. Video-based training has made that easier than ever — with a few downsides.

Video tutorials, for better or worse

Most video tutorials online are something like an in-person class — a mix of a lectures (listen to me) and tutorials (do it with me). The main benefits are obvious: it’s asynchronous, and a video can show you exactly how to do something. But compared to a real-life trainer, there are downsides too: you can’t ask questions and get an immediate answer, and a trainer that’s too fast or too slow can be hard to manage. You’re also probably not going to be taught anything that can’t be easily demonstrated, and you can miss out on subtleties than an in-person teacher would simply talk about.

Assuming the speed is OK, and your questions are being anticipated and answered by the trainer, you can still learn a lot with video training. Importantly, if you’re taking a course (a series of videos delivered as a whole) then you will learn things you didn’t expect, because you don’t know what you don’t know yet. Search engines can only answer the questions that they’re asked, but humans can suggest a superior alternative approach. A good teacher will tell their students what they need to know, not what they think they need to know.

For example, I regularly teach video editing in person, and most of my students have already done some kind of self-directed learning: trying things out, stumbling, then searching when stuck and following free online tutorials. Before I tell them, very few of my students know what J, K and L do with regard to video playback. It’s not obvious, they never asked, and they never found a YouTube video that told them. 

This modern style of learning — stumble around then search — does not usually lead a user to a good workflow in a complex app. It’s slow, it’s inefficient, and it can be a colossal waste of time. But it does get worse, because many potential teachers are making videos not just for committed learners, but for the widest possible audience.

Casual learning through social media

Pure information requires concentration and commitment, but a little distraction and a little entertainment can make information more easily digestible — helping more casual learners engage with new information more easily. Sure, a simple screen recording might show the same content, but for the casual learner, it’s more entertaining for a video to include jokes, lots of camera angles, quick edits, and fancy transitions. The actual teaching content is disguised and diluted in an effort to appeal to a wider audience, and while that’s OK in small doses, we’re learning less overall.

This dilution is far worse in the land of short, vertical educational videos on social media, where the content is entirely focused on instant visual appeal, and abbreviated very heavily. In many contexts, distraction has now been cranked to the point where they’ve overwhelming the content. TikToks are a disaster for learning — too quick, too hard to pause, too surface-focused.

If we want to create truly engaging, informative content, we should be making content that’s worth seeking out, and worth paying attention to. If we keep making content for people who don’t really care about learning, we’re just making entertainment. Not everything needs to target the lower common denominator.

How did we get here?

It’s all about incentives. Trainers are only incentivised to write books or create paid video training courses if they can sell them, and that’s becoming harder — a shrinking pool of customers and a shrinking pool of trainers to serve them. Classroom-based training has been shrinking for many years now, as fewer companies are willing to pay for their employees to learn how to use apps well.

You don’t even have to be good at teaching to make free educational videos. While there are talented teachers on YouTube, too many speak far too quickly, assume far too much prior knowledge, or fail to show key steps in the process. Quality is very variable, and while you can mitigate these issues by paying for training, many people now expect all content to be free. A great paid training course cannot compete with a free one. 

For free online video, analytics tell creators that engagement is everything, so a video that’s watched over and over is seen as “good” and pushed by algorithms. But these are the wrong metrics.

Because the most important metric is “engagement”, creators are perversely incentivised to create content that’s hard to understand the first time through. If a confusing, too-fast video ends up showing something cool, and because pausing and scrubbing is often disabled, viewers will watch it over and over again to try to figure out to follow its instructions. The more time we waste, the more the algorithms send us more time-wasting videos. Madness.

Most problematic of all, because web search is free and convenient, many learners use web search as their primary (if not only) information source. Even though the written word remains a deep source of reliable information, search engines like Google are much more likely to answer a query with videos or an AI-derived list of steps than a link to an authoritative written answer from a textbook. If it’s not free and available within a few clicks, then to many people, it doesn’t exist.

Video is great, but it’s not everything

As video makers, we owe it to our clients to help them to create the best product possible, not just make videos. If a company needs, for legal or other reasons, to explain the safest and best way to perform a task or evacuate a building, then we should be helping to figure out the best way to get that information across, even if it’s not a video.

I’ve certainly made many videos that demonstrate how to evacuate a building or lift a heavy box safely, and that’s a great use of the medium. But a video is not the best way to show a boring wall of text that each employee has to agree to — that should be a web page or a PDF. A complex concept is sometimes best represented as a complex, well-documented diagram; not everything can or should be simplified to the point where it can be shown in a video.

In short: an image is only worth a thousand words if those words are describing an image.

Try something. Watch a typical TV news report, a longer one, lasting a couple of minutes. Now read a transcript of that same report, and check how long it takes you to read. Sure, you didn’t see all the images, but how much information did they really add? Would words alongside a few pictures have been easier and quicker to ingest?

Of course, this experiment depends entirely on which news report you watched — and some are absolutely worth watching.

Here’s a transcript and a YouTube link for perhaps the great news report of all time. For comparison, this took me a minute to read, but the video runs for 3 incredible minutes and 24 unmissable seconds. This one is great, but a video of someone simply talking? Read the words instead.

Conclusion

Clearly, a video can show people how to do something in a way that a book can’t. There are a great many contexts in which you can help your clients to create great educational content, but video shouldn’t be the only option. A few clearly written sentences with a couple of pictures is trivial to understand and easy to follow, and should be valued when used well. But at the moment, analytics and a drive to “maximize engagement” are leading us to a dark place, where people yell at each other in reaction videos instead of actually thinking, reading and writing.

Learning can be glorious, but it’s worth devoting time to it. If you only learn by accident, when you’re being entertained, then it’s probably worth seeking out more targeted learning, away from the typical free options. There are great teachers out there, and you’ll get a lot more out of it. You never know, it might even be worth reading a book or two.