Educational Video Production
From animated explainers and instructional videos to live-action educational content and multi-video series, we'll help you develop a creative approach that makes your message easier to understand and remember.
What is educational video content and why use it?
Educational video content is useful, informative, share-worthy content that helps position you and your company as an expert or thought leader in your field. It could be a behind the scenes look into how your product is made, an animated infographic, or a video about current trends in your industry. You might also consider turning your most popular blog posts and most frequently asked questions into educational video content. If it’s something your audience would benefit from knowing, it would make a good candidate for a video.
Any industry can be ripe for creating educational video content. All it takes is a little expertise, like knowing how airplane Wifi works, or a trending topic, like how to prepare healthy lunches. Educational content is also a good way to widen your funnel and move up in search rankings for hot topics.
What are some characteristics of a great educational video production?
- Useful and informative
- Clear messaging
- Simple, easy-to-follow teaching points
- Engaging on-screen talent or characters
- 1-2 minutes in length
Teaching the teachers. Training the trainer. Professoring…the professor. Okay, the last phrase doesn’t really work but Demo Duck has worked on a large number of education video productions and we know that creating content for educators involves a whole different approach. Check out some of our work at the link below!
When and how should I use educational video content?
Educational videos should be used at the top of the funnel to generate awareness and build trust. They are not meant to sell a product or service. They’re most successful as an engagement tool on social media or strategically placed on your blog as part of your content marketing efforts.
Looking for video examples for the education industry?
The Demo Duck team was able to take complex subject matter (agile web development) and turn it into clear, concise educational video content.
Aurimas Adomavicius, DevBridge Group
How does Demo Duck create a concept for educational video content?
If you already have the subject matter figured out, great. Demo Duck will take whatever the content is and figure out the best framework for teaching it. This often means interacting with the experts on your team and working together to define a clear message with an engaging story.
A concept could be an animated talking narwhal educating viewers about climate change or one of your engineers talking about how satellites work. If you don’t know exactly what you should teach your audience, but you know a general category, we’ll pitch you a few of our ideas. The possibilities are endless.
A good explainer video concept needs to balance creative and strategy. The creative is required to engage the viewer and give them a reason to care about watching your video. The strategy is required to ensure you deliver a message that resonates with your viewers and motivates them to take the desired action.
And let's talk about length. In general, folks feel that shorter is better, but when it comes to educational content folks are willing to hang around, especially if they are opting into watching the piece. For an educational video production we would recommend taking the time needed to clearly articulate all of the key points and not rush past, and through, content to hit a certain duration.
Producing effective videos for how people learn
Clients who have created educational video content with us in the past have often commended our ability to effectively combine creative thinking with proven scientific learning methods. With several team members trained in Instructional Design, we take our ability to teach others to heart. Here are just a few of the tactics we consider when crafting effective content for learners.
Cognitive Load Theory: Put simply, this is making sure we're not overwhelming viewers with a video that overstuffs the visuals and speeds through the content. While that maximalist approach may work for a commercial video it won't be effective for learners.
Information Chunking: Many clients come to us with the idea of a single long form video to communicate their ideas, sometimes proposing videos that could run up to 45 minutes. Those videos have their place, but we think it's important to consider the best way to break down complex topics so the information is more digestible and the audience has a higher propensity to retain the information.
Signaling Principle: Since we're creating a multi-media learning experience with video content, it's paramount we add visual cues for the viewer to draw their eye to the most important information in frame. This can be done with circles, arrows, underlining, bolding, zooms, opacity shifts, and more.
Need an LMS video series or interactive content? We gotcha.
If you're producing videos for a Learning Management System (LMS) and not quite sure where to start, there's a few technical components to consider first.
Early on you should assess whether you need individual, SCORM-compliant video files or a SCORM package as your final deliverable. Demo Duck has experience across both of these delivery types with the former usually meaning our client will take the provided file and create a SCORM package for their LMS, or design the course directly within their LMS itself. If you require a SCORM package as your final deliverable, this means there will be some additional complexity to the project. We'll need to get aligned on the interactivity of learning experience (questions, decision points, additional informational slides, etc.), technical specs of the final SCORM package, and include QA testing on the backend too.
From a content perspective, you'll also want to weigh how course info is spread across the learners' multi-media experience. In an LMS you have the option to present them with material through videos, slides, annotations, questions, and more, so creating an outline of the learning journey during preproduction, similar to wireframes for a website, will better ensure you're covering the right content with the right medium(s).
Some more educational videos to watch, listen & learn:
CCF - Medication Animation
CFR - Animated Concept Breakdown
Gogo - Plane Talk w/ Engineers
Pets for Life - Mixed Media Animation
ACS - Skin Check Animation
Niantic - Hosted Animated Walkthrough
Educational video production FAQs
How do you measure success for an educational video production?
Measuring success for educational video content is best uncovered by looking at engagement rate, bounce rate on the page it's hosted, affirmation of understanding in the comments. If you have the videos as part of an LMS module, the success can be easily tracked with the completion rate and test scores. These videos are often used to boost SEO as well, so your search rankings are another piece of data to keep an eye on.
How much does educational video content cost?
Depending on the length, style and complexity, most of the higher-end educational we work on these days run in the $20,000–$25,000 range for animation, and the $35,000-50,000+ range for live action. Looking to produce a series of videos? Great! We’re always happy to discuss package pricing to bring the per video cost down. You’ll likely find that prices vary greatly from company to company, so take your time, do your homework, and find a team that fits your brand and can deliver on budget, timeline, and quality.
How long does educational video content take to create?
When crafting an education video production usually takes 10-12 weeks. However, for an explainer or training video series we typically ask for 10 weeks for the initial video, that we'll use as our 'calibration' piece, and then we try to roll out new videos ever 1-2 weeks after that.
How do the ducks get to know our content better than other education video production companies?
The short answer is: a lot of research. This research contains any materials you're able to provide and independent Googling and reading. We want to make sure we're pulling from a few perspectives and also fact checking, with multiple sources, any statistics being included. We also use several tech platforms to help us better uncover, cite, and verify information.
How does a good educational video production think about pacing?
A great question, and thank you for asking! The word we often use for pacing is 'deliberate.' That's because we want to make sure we're leaving room for see-say but also not boring people. If we're cutting out fluffy stuff, especially during the intros a problem prominent in a lot of YouTube videos, we can be more deliberate with our pacing without it negatively impacting engagement rate.
What's the most common pitfall of an educational video project?
We have found that it can be a difficult challenge for clients to avoid the temptation of including a bunch of product features during these videos. It's important that if the series is about an industry topic, we avoid the sales feeling stuff. If it's a series explaining your product, we surely will talk about it, but let's keep it pointed and not try to overstuff each individual video with too many product features.