E-Learning Challenge: Creating How-To Videos
This month, I took part in Tim Slade’s E-Learning Challenge on creating how-to videos.
Challenge: Using Camtasia, create a short, 3–7 minute, software how-to tutorial featuring the application or software of your choice. Your video should clearly explain and demonstrate how to complete a specific task, process, or workflow within the software. Your goal is to create a clear, concise video that helps someone quickly learn the task and feel confident completing it on their own.
My Deliverable: A 5-minute video walking job seekers through using the Teal Job Search Companion to add jobs and contacts to the Teal Job Tracker.
Process
I didn’t want to spend all of my holiday break doing a side project, so I limited myself to what I could get finished in one day with breaks for family meals and a game of Lego Party, where I vanquished my wife and kids before disappearing to my desk again. Between scripting, recording, narrating, editing, and captioning the video, I’d estimate that I spent about 7-8 hours of work.
As I was the content expert for this project, I did a test run to find a job that would allow me to showcase the features I wanted to higihlight (adding a job and a contact to the tracker), refamailiarize myself with the procedure, and create the script for the video. Once that was finished, I ate the frog and recorded the segment where I’m talking to the camera, which was by far my least favorite part of the project, before advancing to screen recording each step and recording the audio.
Challenges
When I started my run-through, I quickly realized that the extension had gone through quite the transformation since I used it on my job search last January. Fortunately, the process was intuitive, but it was a significant adjustment from what I initially planned to do in the video.
The other challenge I faced was redacting personal information throughout the video. None of the information that would have been shown is private, but I didn’t want to include user information on a video without their permission; it was also good practice in protecting personal information. Catching all of the times names appeared in the active window, tab names, and even in the black bar that displays website addresses in the lower left corner of your window when you hover over a link was tedious, but not difficult. The challenge came when the Job Search Companion sidebar was expanding. I had hoped that I would be able to use a simple Custom Animation and align the movement of the redactions with the sidebar expanding, but the easing in and out of the sidebar’s animation made that to be difficult and I ended up needing to go frame-by-frame to redact that information.
What Would I Do Differently?
Once the video was completed and uploaded, I reflected on what I would do differently if I had more time. The first thing that came to mind is that I should have used second-person point of view and been talking to my viewers (“you will select…” instead of “I will select…”). I began narrating in first-person when I told my story to communicate the importance and value of the tool, but I do believe switching to second-person would have improved the walkthrough portion of the video.
Feedback
I shared the end result on LinkedIn and was surprised to see Dave Fano, CEO of Teal, in the comments section complimenting the video.
I was also happy to see others in eLearning Designer’s Academy community share that they found the video useful and are planning to use it themselves.
