Introduction

Videos have become the most popular medium for distributing and consuming training content across the world. Instructional Designers (ID) love them because the rich animated text and images allow IDs to effectively convey training content to learners, leaving no scope for personal interpretation and miscommunication of information.

Learners love videos because of the engaging nature of the medium. As videos use two of the human senses, sight and hearing, for delivering information, they are better at grabbing the attention of learners. Once you have the learners’ attention, it is easier to communicate with them. In general, learners retain visual information more than textual information.

Moreover, the video format is highly standardized today, MP4 being the popular standard. So, it is easier to create and publish videos and also consume them.

Although, video is a great medium for imparting knowledge to learners, the medium is generic in nature, because it uses the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. The concept of personalized videos has come into play to address the generic nature of videos and make them more engaging.

This blog post explores the application of personalized videos in the field of Instructional Design.

Overview of Personalized Videos

As the name suggests, personalized videos contain personalized content for individual viewers or a small group of viewers.

The need for personalized videos was felt in the Marketing field initially. These videos helped organizations improve their sales by connecting with customers at a personal level. Soon, other fields, such as e-commerce, real estate, and advertising, took note of this powerful concept and bought into the idea.

Now, it is time the training field also adopted this concept to make training content more engaging and relevant to learners. IDs should consider developing personalized videos by including learner-specific information, such as a learner’s name, photo, and other specific content.

So far, it was easy to personalize textual content, such as e-mails, Web pages, and PDF documents, but it was difficult to personalize videos. However, the advent of personalized video platforms (PVPs) has made it easier to personalize videos also.

Features of PVPs

PVPs are a new class of software application that help in personalizing videos. The personalization is achieved by overlaying personalized content on top of templatized videos. Some of the features provided by PVPs include:

• They can overlay personalized content, such as text, charts, and images, on templatized videos.
• They can support multiple languages.
• The personalized videos can run on any Web site.
• They can provide powerful analytics, such as how many learners have viewed videos.
• The videos can also integrate with chatbots. So, if a user types a question into a chatbot, the chatbot can reply with a personalized video.

Benefits of Personalized Videos

Personalized videos can help IDs in delivering engaging training content to learners at a personal level. Better engagement will result in better learning outcomes.

In addition, personalized videos can save the effort and cost of developing, hosting, and maintaining training videos. Only one version of a templatized video will be stored on the server. The PVP will overlay the templatized video with different personalized content for each learner or group of learners. So, lesser storage space will be required to store the video, and also only one video file will require edits in case of any updates.

The learners will enjoy a better learning experience because the training videos will be tailored to their specific learning needs. Personalized videos will cut the clutter and prevent information overload, which will motivate the learners to consume the videos. The highly tailored content will help learners to quickly assimilate and apply the knowledge gained, thus increasing their confidence and satisfaction levels.

Vendors of PVPs

Due to the popularity of personalized videos, there are several platforms available for personalizing videos. At present, they are mainly used for personalizing sales and marketing videos. Some of them are:

• Vintom (http://vintom.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQjww47nBRDlARIsAEJ34bk0VYkCiJIaI4FjEWgkUKVNZp5iK7LMMvmTgA-WSmYYjEywjaPb9akaAq3NEALw_wcB)
• Rocketium (https://rocketium.com/is/automated-personalized-video-maker-for-business-outreach-sales-and-marketing)
• Vidyard (https://www.vidyard.com/marketing/personalized-video/)

We should try to identify training use cases where similar platforms can be used. Also, e-learning authoring tool vendors should look into these platforms and include similar features in their tools.

Personalized Videos in Learning

The world is moving towards microlearning, at least for non-mission critical training. And, microlearning is dominated by the video format instead of the traditional e-learning packages.

So, this gives us IDs an excellent opportunity to personalize the microlearning videos and make them more impactful and engaging for the learners.

In addition to the training-related use cases, organizations can use personalized videos for onboarding new employees and communicating with the employees in change management programs.

Conclusion

The concept of personalized videos is another step towards improving the learning experience of learners by addressing their individual training needs. This concept has opened doors to exciting possibilities in the Instructional Design field.

This technology may evolve to support 360 degree videos. When that happens, IDs will be able to develop personalized virtual reality experiences by using personalized 360 degree videos.