Video Scripts and Storyboards: Seven Ways to Motivate Your Learners

In both workplace and academic environments, people are often unmotivated because they are required to take video based training courses in which they have no interest. Luckily, in the online world most of the buyers for our video courses will have freely chosen to purchase our training and excited to dive in.
But, with that said, we still need to work hard at creating learning experiences that get audiences engaged and motivated to watch all of our course. If they find themselves bored and distracted after the first ten minutes we may find ourselves with some serious refunds and a bad reputation.

To create training videos that really motivate adults we must continually hone our writing talents and learn the nuances of carefully crafting storyboards that motivate adults to pay attention and stay engaged in our Videos.

Below I’ll share some helpful tips to keep in mind while you design your training experience and begin crafting the storyboard. These tips have helped me put out video courses that my clients and our LearnCamtasia.com students have benefited from and enjoyed taking

1. Create an experience, not just a course. What can you do to make a course unforgettable? Create an online and offline learning experience. Market your course to the audience to create buzz (multiple advanced emails and social media), ask friends and affiliates to market for you, throw a related event (free webinar?), incorporate activities and projects to enhance learning, provide personal support for those having difficulty and provide follow-up.
2. Be sure the course has useful and relevant learning experiences. Adult learners appreciate immediate relevancy. It’s a great incentive when training is immediately valuable and helpful to one’s work or personal life. Be sure you suggest activities they can do immediately after the training to help transfer the learning to their job and use lots of examples and stories that directly relate to the learners job or situations to which they can relate.
3. Focus on practical knowledge and skills. Related to the strategy above, try to concentrate on workplace (or real life) performance, rather than on extraneous facts and theories that most adults would rather skip over. It is pretty safe to say that you can usually skip the “History of….” topic.
4. Provide options. Adults usually like choices that promote self-direction. When possible, allow your viewers to choose the topics they will take within a curriculum or subject category. Even if you provide a suggested order, allow learners to take lessons in a sequence that works for them. Camtasia can put your Topics in a Table of Contents which allows the students to skip around and learn things in the order that works for them.
5. Facilitate exploration. Provide resources, references, podcasts, and guides to create an ideal environment for personal exploration. Adults have a breadth of experience. Exploration provides an opportunity to construct knowledge in a way that is meaningful for each learner. And templates, such as workbooks and checklists, give them a handy way to organize the content.
6. Build community through Social Media. Implement a social media strategy as part of a learning experience. Use social networking applications and services to build groups with a common interest or goal. Sharing knowledge and experience through informal networks is a motivating and natural way to learn. You may have see Twitter groups created using hashtags as a way for people to collaborate.  Live Webinar Q&A sessions also allow groups to learn from one another. Lon and I use Facebook Private Forums for online interaction during and after many of our training courses.

7. Accommodate group interactions. Provide opportunities for group discussion, collaboration and group problem solving. Forums are great for this and can be created for free in many different tools.
These are my top tips to consider when you are designing the plan for your video training courses. And be sure to incorporate these while you are writing your script and storyboard as that is the foundation for your video training.

These are just a few of the ways we try to make our courses more fun and cater to the way we know adults learn best.  This takes planning and when you plan your video course design and your script/storyboard be sure you incorporate some of these techniques.

For those that are interested in learning more our “Science of Scripting and Storyboarding” course is on sale for half price starting Tuesday January 30th-Friday February 3rd . Subscribers will receive their coupon code Monday evening.  Not a subscriber? You’re missing out on all the sales! Subscribe here.