Quantcast
Channel:
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 96

Training Video vs How-To Video vs TikTok Video – What’s Good for Online Course

0
0

Making training video can turn out as a big challenge for launching online course. In my live coaching, I find this to be true with many students.

On the face of it, this may seem a bit odd, especially when it is so easy to make and upload different types of videos on social media. People do this all the time.

But then social media videos are not training videos.

And so, even though TikTok is a hugely popular video making app on the web, it is mostly geared toward fun and entertainment.

In contrast, when you decide to make a how-to video – say, how to embed multiple audio clips in a PowerPoint slide – you have to do some planning to make it useful for the target audience.

Then again, for a one-off how-to video or a product tutorial video, you may not do much planning because you are limited to explaining your ideas in one, maybe 2 to 3 videos max.

If you wanna test this, go have a look at how-to videos on YouTube. Most of them are one-off videos, with few exceptions.

40% OFF on Stunning Video Ads with PowerPoint

So, in a nutshell, the main differences between training video, how-to video and TikTok video are these:

  1. TikTok video –
    • Least planning required
    • More for fun or entertainment than education
    • Short video length, mostly shot with a camera
  2. How-to video –
    • Moderate planning needed
    • Usually one-off video explaining a particular topic
    • Different media types used to make
  3. Training video –
    • Detail planning essential
    • Mostly part of a course with more training videos
    • Depends on course structure
    • Different media types used to make

What emerges from this differentiation is that, if you are to make training videos for an online course, you need to adopt a holistic approach, and not one-off efforts.

It is more like writing a book or making a movie. Lots of jigsaw pieces will have to come together to make well-planned online course videos.

 

Training videos follow a chain of pre-decided continuity.

As distinct as they are from how-to videos, when you make training videos for an online course, you need to work on a detail plan before starting to make them.

This is because, unlike how-to videos, the training videos should have a clear connection of continuity from one to the next, like the chapters and contents of a book or the scenes of a movie.

That doesn’t mean you cannot make online course from how-to videos.

Let’s take an example.

Suppose you have made a series of how-to videos, like

a) steps for early morning meditation,
b) do these 20 min morning workouts
c) how to prioritize your daily to-do list,
d) how to prepare quick healthy breakfast,
e) how to select your best attire for office, and so on.

These are apparently un-connected, but when you look at them closely, you can possibly bring them together under a single course, naming it as, How to be Your Best Self in the Office Every Day. In that case, the how-to videos are none else but training videos for the course.

I’ve seen wellness courses like the above example, so this is not a wild imagination,

What ties these disparate how-to lessons together for a course is that they all have a clear connection of continuity with respect to the course topic.

Now, that is important.

To add a little more on this, many upwardly mobile office-goers may find such a course very useful … and that means if you make the course you are likely to have ready takers with deep pockets.

 

Clear thinking is essential.

Whether you put together how-to videos for an online course, or plan training videos in a logical sequence, you will need clear thinking on how to plan and execute the course.

However, in my live coaching classes, often the opposite happens.

This is unfortunate, but true.

There will be some students eager to start making training videos for their courses … without doing necessary homework.

They ask, “Why spend time on planning if I can do that as my work progresses?”

This can work with veteran course makers, NOT if you’re new to making online course.

So, what happens is, unmindful of the pitfall arising out of lack of planning, the new course makers soon find themselves trapped inside a deep void of ‘nowhere’, thus wasting their efforts and valuable time.

The other side of this is equally alarming.

Many students (mainly coaches and teachers who are already well-known in their offline space) come to my coaching with huge slide-decks with the sole expectation of turning the whole stuff into training videos for their courses.

Does that / will that work?

No!

Because, think again! There is no clarity nor planning on what the online course should be about, and crucially, what it should not be about.

Online courses are different from offline teaching. And, unless you have good reasons, you don’t make huge courses online because that’s NOT how it works.

This holds true even when you feel you should start live teaching online instead of making a course to begin with.

Coming to making training videos, I have collected some points here which you, as an aspiring online course maker, may want to consider before embarking on making them for your online course.

 

A) Write a master guide.

I am a great admirer of writing down a master guide for all my online courses. The best thing about a master guide is that it helps me to stay on course.

So, why need this in the first place?

Better still, how to make a master guide?

To answer that ask yourself – what is it that your online course will teach?

Think about this, and write down a somewhat descriptive essay on it, touching upon salient features you consider important.

Making master guide is not an alien concept, filmmakers of repute are known to take this work seriously.

Let me a give here an example of master guide for a course on making soups for dinner. I have taken this from Project Gutenberg’s Miss Leslie’s New Cookery Book, by Eliza Leslie, 1857.

There are nearly 40 recipes of different flavors of soups in the cookbook, but let’s say you want to make a course on making 10 types of soups, and you want to give the course title as – 10 Tasty Soups for Dinner in Less Than 30 Mins.

So, for this course, the master guide could resemble something like the screenshot below (taken from the cookbook):

Training Video Master Guide

As you can see, the cooking of different soups is fairly well explained.

When you make a master guide like this, it becomes the biggest help not only to take you forward, and also to fall back on whenever you’ve doubts in mind.

So, you’ve the master guide. What’s next? Well, the next step will be to build a course structure.

 

B) Course structure is paramount.

Let us say you already know –

a) your course has good demand in the market, and you also know
b) what your course title will be.

These two are essential prerequisites, no shortcuts.

So, once you know them, the next step is to determine the course structure.

What you will do here is, break down the course into modules and lessons, just like the table of contents of a book.

You would name the modules and do the same for lessons under each module.

After you complete this work, what you get is a well-planned course structure that will give the direction for your course.

At this stage, and not any time before, you can finally say that you know what your training videos are going to be.

A well-planned course structure sets you on the path of planning and making training videos. And once you come to learn doing this, you will find it easy to take this forward for your online course.

 

C) What to say, what to show.

Not knowing how to make a training video is a serious handicap for online course makers.

Even though many of students are good at using PowerPoint slide decks for live presentations, I find them at a loss for making videos out of those slides.

This is why I break down the video making to just 2 critical elements –

1. What to say, and
2. What to show.

When you focus on these 2 elements for video making, you will be able to filter out all those that don’t belong to your course.

Interestingly, a well-made course structure is a great help to decide what to say and what to show for making video lessons.

Again, the course structure is the starting point for deciding what texts and visuals you will be showing in the training videos.

Equally, you should also know what to say or narrate when you make the video for each lesson in each module.

Both saying and showing complement each other. When you are sure of the 2 elements, making video lessons becomes a lot easier.

And when that happens, you suddenly start to realize that every piece of work you have been doing thus far makes enormous sense to creating a great online course.

 

Summing up

Like the making of a new building, there is a good deal of apparently disparate works that come together to make an online course.

As the Covid-19 pandemic rages on for months since early 2020, coaches, teachers, and trainers who have not launched online courses yet, will feel the need to do this without delay.

But, in the hurry to do this fast, there is the danger of making mistakes.

Mistakes can hold back your efforts, or worse, they can discourage you from going ahead. I know this well, because as a long-time online course maker I’ve made mistakes that delayed my progress many a time.

In my 6-week live coaching, I teach all the crucial aspects of making training videos and launching the best online course in less than a month.

If you are interested, consider filling in this form to join the list of attendees so that you can be informed when the next classes begin.

 

The post Training Video vs How-To Video vs TikTok Video – What’s Good for Online Course first appeared on .

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 96

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images