If we do not do what's necessary to help people remember, remember key parts of it and use those those in their work or their life, then we're not being successful.

That's Patty Schenk. She's a learning designer, a researcher, and someone who spent decades thinking deeply about how we help people actually learn. And here's the uncomfortable truth. Just because you made a video doesn't mean it taught anybody anything. Video is everywhere in learning, in our classrooms, in our corporate onboarding, on YouTube, and we all kind of assume it works, right?

A lot of people say we use video because it's more engaging. Well, what does that mean actually?

In this episode, we're pulling back the curtain on what actually makes video effective for learning and what makes it fail. Because as Patty reminds us, it's not about the format, it's about the processing.

So that people have to think about what they just saw. Or they may say, Let me see it again. Um, that sort of thing. Um, that's one of the biggest aha's I got that that the processing is the instruction.

Let's start with the brain. You might have heard of Mayer's Multimedia Theory. It explains how we learn from images and audio at the same time. Patty breaks it down with the simple idea. We have two channels, visual and auditory.

We read much faster than we listen. So that's a difficulty. For example, if if we have text on the screen that that just picks out some key words and we have an image that we're describing with narration, it's easier.

That mismatch causes overload. If your video shows text and reads it out loud, your brain gets caught in a tug of war. Think of it like a car ride. You're watching the scenery go by, but suddenly you arrive and you don't remember a thing. That's what passive video does to your brain. So what actually works? Patty says it comes down to one word, control.

Is the fact that people can review video more than once a big deal? I would have said, well, I don't know that it's a big deal, but it's a good thing. Um, and now I know it's a it's a huge deal, which means one of the tactics that you and I need to follow is they must always have a player. Um, and they must be able to stop, start, and replay. Um, that's one of the massive aha's about um good video is don't just play video, um, let people decide what speed to play it at, um, when to stop it, when to rewind it, those sorts of things.

Let learners pause, let them rewind, let them go at their own speed. And don't try to do everything in one clip. Anything else you see that you think that's really maybe hindering folks in learning and development from being really effective with their video creation and their video usage.

Um yeah, I do see those things. Um probably the biggest one, the one that happens the most often is background music. In the background behind someone talking, so you've got two audio inputs coming in that people are trying to process at the same time. It's not possible for if someone's listening to the narration and watching the screen, those two go together. The the background music doesn't um necessarily, unless you've got, let's say you've got background music that has um, I don't know, the sound the sound of water going over uh a cliff, you know, and you're talking about waterfalls and that sort of thing. So it so it's part of it. Um I think it would be way too much and way too loud and um audio going behind. Um and if you're asking people to have to figure out how to focus, and you give them too much to focus on, they may focus in the wrong place. And they and when that happens, they're not they're not listening, they're not hearing, they're not seeing.

So yeah, maybe skip the soundtrack under your narration. Patty said something that stuck with me because it changes how we think about all instructional video.

Is that we've got we've got the design for processing.

Think about that. Video isn't the learning, it's the delivery. The teaching happens when the learner does something with it. That could be a reflection, a prompt, a practice, an exercise, or even replacing a toilet. One last gem. Patty reminds us how powerful video can be because it lets people re-watch, pause, revisit, relearn, but only if we design it in that way. Now you can check out all of Patty's research series on the e learning industry. We'll link in the show notes. And if you're rethinking how you use video in your work, good. So are we. And thanks for listening, and as always, we hope you take a little time to level up every single day.