Most courses aren’t collaborative. Leaders infer employees’ needs and create a course teaching skills to overcome them. It’s less effective to do it this way—what would be better is if leaders could collaborate with employees to determine exactly what and how they want to learn.
Follow the next six steps to creating an animated training course on which employees can collaborate. Workers’ involvement ensures that the training is helpful and launches in the shortest amount of time possible.
1. Interview employees
Talk with some employees you wish to upskill to learn about their job’s challenges. When you know their problems and have the space to discuss them in detail, you have the information you need to create valuable training.
Don’t just jump into the deep questions right away; start with some small talk so your employee feels comfortable. Discussing the most pressing issues from the start can overwhelm employees.
Ask them to describe common problems they face and have them walk you through the exact situations where they face these problems. With this information, you can decide if a skill would solve these issues or if the problem lies in how employees do tasks.
Drafting some of these questions beforehand is okay, but don’t stick to a rigid script. You want the conversation to flow naturally with follow-up questions to truly understand the problem and identify possible solutions. Digging into these topics can reveal bigger problems to solve than the ones you considered.
2. Create a script and a storyboard
Scripts outline the video’s structure and speaker’s lines, and storyboards depict events. Create these documents to save time animating redundant, confusing, or boring scenes.
You should review both with your team and cut what doesn’t fit or what you could explain better:
- You’re the only one who understands a section? Rewrite it.
- Added something you love, but teammates tell you it’s redundant? Reconsider it.
- Did you add too many statistics to your script? See if visualizing them with charts would make the scene clearer.
Develop a structure for your script that helps you accomplish your goal. If you want to teach a specific skill, ask yourself, “What information should the speaker say to help employees master this?” Write the answer. Then move paragraphs around until the sequence of events is engaging and cohesive.
Your storyboard should consist of a series of boxes showing rough sketches of your scenes with the lines and direction for that scene written underneath. You can get started creating one with our free storyboarding template. Think of everything you need to display in the scene to clearly communicate your message, then quickly draw them in the boxes. Don’t worry about making them too detailed; you just need to provide a rough idea of the scene so you can garner feedback.
3. Make your video with Vyond
For collaborative learning to work, employees must be able to share their knowledge easily. If creating a course takes a long time, they won’t have time to produce it with their busy schedule. Vyond is an animation software with dozens of templates you can use to quickly turn your storyboard and script into a helpful video.
Start by logging into your free Vyond account and clicking on “Create a new character” in the top left corner of the interface. Design a character from scratch, or model it after someone in your company to lend authority to what they say. There are many clothing and body feature options to recreate any employee.
Now you need to make your character move. Select them and click on the Actions menu. You will find many movements your character can do, such as jumping, checking their watch, and pointing in one direction. Choose the one you like to get your character moving. If you want your character to move across the screen, select your character again and open the Motion Paths menu. Combine Actions and Motion Paths to recreate every movement you planned in your script.
Now it’s time to record your lines. Before you start, make sure you get a good night’s rest, as sleep deprivation makes your voice sound rough. Not drinking water has the same effect, so stay hydrated throughout the day.
Once you’ve prepared your voice, access the Mic Recording interface on the Dashboard. Read your lines slowly and deliberately, enunciating every word clearly. Divide your script into sections and record each one separately. It’s easier to record a flawless 20-second clip than a 20-minute one.
4. Upload your video to 360Learning
360Learning’s collaborative approach to training makes it the ideal platform for upskilling your employees. The various feedback from every level of your organization ensures the courses are relevant to everyone and follow a clear and understandable path.
As you populate each course section, others can give you or your colleagues feedback. They can recommend you add resources to make a video clearer or upload some themselves. This feedback loop keeps your videos and training improving, even after launching them. It also ensures each version of your course is more relevant than the last.
You and your team can upload any Vyond-made video to 360Learning, regardless of size. Log in to the platform and click on “Dashboard.” Go to your Courses section, then click “Add a document” next to any of your courses. Upload a video from your computer or import it from YouTube, Vimeo, or Google Drive.
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Read more about adding a video to 360Learning in this article! | |
5. Design a captivating thumbnail
Employees look past uninteresting thumbnails, missing out on the lessons you or another worker created. The right design persuades them to click and watch the course.
Use a before-and-after layout to create a thumbnail that grabs your employees’ attention. An artificial intelligence analyzed common visual elements among 600 trending YouTube thumbnails. It found that many of these videos use this format for their thumbnail. Much of its success comes from what it communicates: the visual benefit of implementing the video’s lessons.
It’s also advisable to add faces with obvious emotions. According to Netflix, people are more likely to click thumbnails showing intense emotions rather than stoic ones since intense emotions resonate with viewers. It gives the viewer a preview of your video’s tone, so they know if it’s exciting, thought-provoking, or creative.
Canva is a free design tool you can use to achieve a before-and-after layout and find faces with obvious emotions. People of all ages use it, making it ideal for companies wanting every employee to have a voice on how the course looks and feels.
6. Analyze what could improve
No matter how long you work on your animations, you can’t predict exactly what employees will think about your course. You need to launch your training and check how workers interact with it to learn its strengths and weaknesses. Use this data to understand what you should change or improve to teach new skills to more employees.
360Learning’s analytics ability gives you access to all the data you need. On your Dashboard, click on General to see the number of people taking the course, the time they spend on it, and how many finish it. Employees probably don’t see your course as valuable if you have low rates. Talk to some employees, determine why that is, and think through solutions with your team. For example; you might consider incorporating instructor interaction using 360Learning’s video coaching capabilities.
