🌱 3 of the best ways to teach with video
Welcome back to our series! We're so glad you're here. In today's post, Atlassian Learning's Garrett Marttinen explores how the Learning Content Design Team uses best practices from the science of learning to guide video use in lessons.
The scene: The Learning Content Design Team plans to build a lesson called Create work items in Jira for their free on-demand training library. Course designers will need to meet the needs of learners who have never seen Jira’s interface before and experienced Jira users who want to move through the lesson quickly, verifying their understanding as they go.
Read on to see how the team used video best practices to guide content decisions in this lesson—best practices that teams of all types can apply to a wide variety of situations.
Video best practices
Video can be a powerful way to engage an audience—just think of Atlassian Learning's new Atlassian Answered video series.
When done right, video is a superpower.
On the Learning Content Design Team, we’ve found the best ways to wield video for learning are to:
How we built a lesson using video best practices
Let’s explore how our team used these video best practices to build the Create work items in Jira lesson.
Work items are one of the first things learners need to know about Jira, which means someone learning about them is probably new to Jira as a whole and will need context.
In the lesson, learners are first introduced to work types, and then they explore how to create a work item. Learners see a text explanation, a still image, and then a video tying everything together:
The short video sets the scene and draws the audience into the world of Jira quickly and comfortably. Learners are exposed to the different ways they can create a work item while the voice over explains what’s happening.
After the video, the lesson presents more complex information with images and text, including drop-down boxes and tables. We switched away from video here to support both new and experienced learners. New learners can easily get washed away in a flood of information with videos about complex or technical topics, and they can become fatigued rewinding, replaying, and pausing. On the other hand, video-heavy content can frustrate experienced learners because it forces them to move at a slower pace; if you’re already confident in a subsection of a lesson, you’ll want to be able to skim and move on to new-to-you content.
In the image below, you’ll see that experienced Jira users can skim and move on, while new learners can take their time exploring every drop-down:
We also highlighted an important, technical take-away with a still image:
The key to the lesson’s success is a combination of content types: video-only content would be too quick and passive for new learners to absorb all the necessary details and it might slow down experienced users. Text-only content would miss the engaging scene-setting the video offers.
Looking for more details about how we make content decisions?
Check out Atlassian Learning’s philosophy.
If you have questions for our team about how we create and build learning content, we’d love to hear from you in the comments!
Keep an eye out for more "Behind the scenes with Atlassian Learning" posts. 🌱
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Julia Eddington
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