When it comes to education, digital video is the future. How do we know for sure? Because 92% of the digital video viewing audience happen to be millennial’s (source).
Simply put, students today are hardwired a little bit differently than students of years past. Now, when faced with a “How do I do this?” or “What does this mean?” kind of moment, more often than not, they turn to familiar websites and search engines to consume a quick video.
The influence of digital video today is both impressive and undeniable, and in regards to the classroom, everybody has something to gain. In this article, we’re going to put the focus on the students, pointing out the various ways they stand to benefit with the rise of video in education.
1. Videos Offer Students Strong Visual Cues
First and foremost, videos are highly visual. This gives them an inherent advantage when it comes to learning. When trying to break down complex subject matter—like a moment in history, a scientific principle, or a mathematical formula—it often helps to have visual cues.
That’s exactly what a video does. It adds something visual to the learning experience. Through video, one can take something a student might be reading about, or listening to via a lecture from their teacher, and add an extra dimension to it to really bring that concept to life.
2. Videos Help Students Retain More Knowledge
How often might you remember close to every line in a book you read recently? Even if it’s an important book, as most school-issued textbooks tend to be, the answer is likely never.
When it comes to your favourite movie, or better yet, your favourite viral video, however, remembering close to every line is often a piece of cake.
Videos act to help increase knowledge retention, in part because they offer strong visual cues like we mentioned above, and partly because they have a tendency to be paused, rewatched, shared, and consumed more frequently.
3. Videos Follow Students Everywhere They Go
Videos are ubiquitous in that anywhere a student has an active internet connection, they can (and do) consume them. The accessibility to video that exists on different devices—laptops, tablets, and most of all, smartphones—gives it a distinct advantage in terms of learning.
Why? Because students can consume a video whenever they want, wherever they are. The sheer level of convenience and ease through which a student can access video automatically makes it easier for improved cognitive learning through that medium.
4. Videos Create An Engaging Sensory Experience for Students
Building along the same lines as strong visual cues, videos create a more engaging sensory experience for students than using print materials alone.
When you think about it, this makes a ton of sense. As humans, we interact with each other and our surroundings through a multi-sensory process that includes our ears and our eyes.
Video functions very much the same way, by engaging learners and allowing them to process what is happening with both of those same tools.
In Summary
As you can see, students stand to benefit greatly with respect to video, both in and out of the classroom. It’s often the easiest way to reach them, in all forms of the phrase.
The important thing to remember is that for video to be most effective in learning, it needs to be engaging. Watching a dry, hour-long video is the same type of task for a student as reading a passage out of the dictionary. Keeping videos short, interactive, and engaging are the way you keep them memorable and enjoyable, which will help students learn just about anything.
We’re experts in video’s role in education because we’ve built a complete online learning solution in VidVersity. Our unique combination of products and services offer a complete solution for your online learning objectives.
Simply put, we’re invested in helping students become better learners… through video.
