How Interactive Video Transforms Corporate Training
Interactive video changes the way content is delivered, making it more immersive and engaging. At the same time, it allows for greater standardisation and allows for greater intelligence gathering and feedback. Data-driven insights have backed interactive video for better and longer engagement than has ever been achieved with standard linear video or traditional classroom training.
For larger organisations, where responsive decision making is highly valued, the potential for interactive video to improve learning and deliver efficiency savings is huge. We have already seen projects from the likes of emergency response organisations, NGOs and others, that are beginning to tap into the value interactive video can bring.
This is one emerging trend to lean forward into, click and interact with, in 2018.
But how does interactive video work and revolutionalise more traditional role-play training?
What Is Interactive Video?
Interactive video can take many forms. In simple terms, it's a digital video that supports user interaction through various actions such as clicks, touches, or taps. This means that rather than your video taking viewers on a linear journey—where the only options are play, pause, or rewind—your video will go beyond this to create many different paths that users can direct at their fingertips.
Bringing a game-like experience, players can choose the direction of the video narrative by often clicking through branches, hotspots or on-screen objects, answering questions or quizzes and even dragging the cursor for 360 views—all within the video—creating a fully immersive experience.
Instead of watching, users can be tasked with engaging in the learning process, navigating the storyline, and revealing their choices to you, the content curator.
Why Interactive Video?
Good For Every Sector
There are lots of reasons as to why people are opting for interactive video. To begin with, it’s an incredibly diverse medium that can be applicable to any business. Whether that’s for company training, content generation, or starting a campaign.
Long-Lasting Impressions
The immersive device will make your company identity more memorable and inviting in an over-crowded tech marketplace. It's even more effective than webinars, case studies, in-person events, and more, according to a Brightcove survey.
Instant And Immersive Storytelling
If you can recall ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books, interactive video can work in a similar way.
We live in a fast-moving world where everything is instant—messaging, live streaming, and learning. The way we consume content is changing. As consumers, we demand in-depth information delivered to us, like the speed of light, instantly.
The interactive video offers this instantaneous nature and with divergent narratives and several different endings, we are no longer restricted to a single call to action or User Experience.
A study by Forrester Research shows that call to actions (CTA’s) inside video see a 5% -12% higher conversion rate over linear video, that only offers CTA’s around video.
As once said by the well-known Chinese philosopher Confucius:
"Tell me, I will forget. Show me, I will remember. Involve me, I will understand."
We are in the driving seat when it comes to the new norm of user-defined, immersive, and instant experiences that speak directly to the consumer. Now, the audience’s choice is priority and non-linear video gives a greater level of control.
A historical issue to rolling out interactive video had been technological limitations. Then in 2012, it was announced that interactive video had finally become compatible with HTML5 and on a browser.
And since the release of Apple’s iOS X, interactive video now works seamlessly on iOS devices, scaling up and flowing smoothly without interruption or crashes.
As a training and development professional, you endeavour to find better ways to drive learning—teaching large audiences in an effective manner with hopes they’ll absorb and remember information.
But with budgets being tightened, training needs constantly evolving and new staff always coming through the doors, how can interactive video training suit you?
Benefits Of Using Interactive Video For Training
A Cost-Effective Approach To High Staff Turnover
One of the main limitations mentioned for not using interactive video for training is its perceived financial outlay. However, Magna found that an investment in interactive video reaches 52% further than traditional, linear video.
Interactive video training can help cut down notoriously high employee turnover by creating a team spirit culture and improving individual employee’s feelings and attitudes towards career personal development. Ultimately, boosting employee commitment through the training model of participating in something positive, current and personal.
Re-versioning existing content is always an option and for a tech-minded individual, it only takes a short amount of time. Editing or adding additional content can be done much faster than organising a costly training day or writing a new textbook.
Better Training Standards Online
Training managers know that when an employee leaves, the company suffers a loss of productivity and the duty of training a replacement. Handing over the textbook can provide a standardised approach yet is considered outdated and uninspiring. Running workshops and in-class roleplay simulations are typically expensive and unlikely to cement the learning objectives without additional support.
What is important is the presentation of the material. A high-quality eLearning package always consists of training modules, some method of assessment and a component able to report the trainees' progress/results. Additionally, it will offer creative audio-visual ways of learning with interactive video being a strong leader.
Data-Driven Results And User Experience
The data insights you can get from interactive video can be extremely valuable, especially when you add user interactions at points during the video to ask questions. By providing users with control, you ultimately drive desired behaviours because the user is more invested in the content due to their participation. Consequently, revealing insights that allow you to better understand audience preferences, behaviour, and ROI through interactive video.
Interactive Video Brings Role Play Training Online
Those who love role-play describe it as a form of interactive storytelling. It can provide a safe environment to encounter different scenarios. But it can be expensive with a single session costing up anywhere between $500 to $1500 per employee. And once the exercise is over, there’s often no way of recalling the experience or capitalizing on it. Interactive video role-play is a viable alternative or extension.
Replay, Relive And Retain The Experience
Often, we can’t create a true real-life experience on-demand. Whether that’s because actors aren’t fully engaged with the script or topic in that acting moment or we need to control the environment. Perhaps, it’s because of difficult practical expectations. Whatever the reason, it is usually challenging to replicate the true environment in the first instance or over a longer period. Role play scenarios can be filmed and captured in a way to make video content supporting numerous interaction like a normal conversation. It can then be rolled out to large volumes of staff rather than being restricted to one single session.
Build On The Best Take
In addition to understanding the words the other person is saying, it’s important to pay attention to body language and non-verbal clues. Producing online role-play scenarios, you can film actor’s multiple times, from different angles until you get the most natural take to use in the game build. Better to have your team practice these skills using the best enactment via roleplay online than when they’re trying to perform in the real world.
Train Safely, Realistically And On-Demand
No matter how eccentric a situation you produce in a controlled environment, normally, something even more unusual is bound to happen on the job. Interactive video role-playing will give your team the chance to safely witness various unexpected situations and fluent, naturalistic dialogue around the learning objective. Resulting in developing creative problem-solving skills under realistic time-pressure and at their own pace.
Build Team Confidence And Individual Resilience
Role playing allows you to throw any number of situations at your team in a safe environment to encounter these scenarios for the first time, which builds collective confidence that can help them in their day-to-day roles.
And with an online platform, you can capture the decisions made and relay insights to your team whilst keeping the learner anonymous. Privacy is important when dealing with your employee’s personal development but gaining an overall understanding of areas which need more support is extremely valuable and an opportunity to build further resilience.
By letting your learners go on an individual journey to maximise their own understanding, this takes away the task of an in-classroom instructor having to stop and start to explain separately. Instead, a good online platform will either provide a branched response (via a character, like a normal conversation) or rationale post-scenario to keep the learner immersed in a near life environment.
Maximise Your Return On Investment
Recently, emergency crews took part in Europe's largest disaster training exercise to test their response to mass casualties. Lasting for four days, the role play simulations involved a total of 2,000 volunteers and eight London Underground carriages.
If you consider the cost of taking employees away from their work, hiring multiple locations across numerous days, bringing in the actors plus experts and covering their accommodation, transport and costume fees, you’re already creating a heavy budgetary burden for a one-time application.
So why not increase the return on investment by adopting interactive eLearning practices for role-playing simulations?
An eLearning package facilitating interactive video-play and near life simulations would serve as a potential alternative, drastically reduce the training cost or simply provide an extended opportunity to revisit the training by capturing the staged events.
Examples Of Interactive Video Role Play
Little Sister Films created a gamified recruitment video for Deloitte New Zealand that allows candidates to walk in the shoes of a new recruit. Taking a first-person perspective, which purposely feels like a role-playing game, viewers are given the chance to make in-video decisions, and they are introduced to the culture at Deloitte in a fun, light-hearted way that is far more effective than any text job description.
Digital Training Solutions designed HostileWorld; a new interactive training platform that uses Near-Life™ technology to revolutionise hostile environment training and allows journalists, aid workers and others stationed overseas to access crucial skills and knowledge.
Watch the interactive trailer here
Interactive scenarios give learners a taste of the security situations they’ll most likely encounter in the field. As in real-life, they must make quick decisions or the scenario proceeds on the basis of their failure to choose.
Traditionally provided for international journalists, oil and gas contractors, government employees or NGO/humanitarian aid workers, the training would require extensive time away but HostileWorld offers flexible and cost-effective access to training that can be delivered remotely.
Final Thoughts
It’s clear that, in these very different spaces, interactive video can increase engagement and allow people to make choices just as they would in role play scenarios. It’s certainly an exciting trend in the eLearning space and one that is set to become increasingly important over coming years.
