Video learning has seen a tremendous amount of growth recently. As more and more companies are seeing the massive business impact of eLearning, and videos and animations in particular, a lot of eyes are being turned to business leaders to see how they are leading the charge. Companies like Silicon Valley's FAANG and other blue chips like Microsoft and JP Morgan Chase are all investing heavily in eLearning, and most of them are performing many of the same behaviours in their training modules.   Each of these companies has hundreds of publicly available videos giving tutorials on how to access and master their products, and even more internal-only videos used to educate employees on how to manage important tasks. Every single one of these companies has used video learning in a massive way, both designing new modules and converting older modules into videos and animations, and decision makers seem to be happy enough with the results to keep making more.   But why does this work so well? According to the National Library of Medicine, over 65% of the human population learn most effectively through visual learning alone, and most of the remainder learn most effectively through audio. By combining visual and audio stimuli, well-voiced videos and animations can easily select for the highest learning efficiency in the largest portion of the population.   But let's go one step further. Let's see what exactly makes these videos so good. Do they have any patterns we could learn from? Turns out they do.  

1 – Videos and Animations with the Corporate Art Style

  The corporate art style, or Corporate Memphis, has become a ubiquitous trend for many of the wrong reasons. Starting with FAANG, many other companies have picked up the trend without really understanding why they should or shouldn't. On Twitter it's become something of a meme, teased for being soulless and uninspired. It's likely many of these complaints only exist because the market is so oversaturated with these images, but why do companies like Google still stand by this art style and continue to publish eLearning content with it?   It turns out that it's not just an aesthetic choice. Studies from the American Journal of Psychology dating as far back as 1923 show direct corelations of specific colours, shapes and visual patterns with memory retention. Corelations that Google, and the corporate art style in general, actively use to make their marketing, eLearning, and webpages more memorable.  

2 - Product Cross-Section Video Learning

  The human impulse to take something apart to learn how it works is something we often pick up as children, and it stays with us as adults. Many of the world's most successful businesspeople will talk emphatically about how their love for understanding mechanisms in business, science and engineering started with a love of toys like Lego. So how do we capitalize on that same impulse to fascination through adult learning principles?   Companies in aviation and shipping have been using cross-sections of their ships and planes to share information relevant to passengers and staff. Pharmaceutical companies use cross-sections of your body to explain how their products work. Technicians working for manufacturing and machinery companies often find these cross-sections invaluable. Many of the best of these will even pull apart the mechanism further into each of its individual components and how they fit together, going through multiple layers if necessary, depending on the complexity of the product's structure. Creating a way for your employees or customers/clients to construct a visual representation of your product's inner workings helps tremendously in their ability to handle and understand how it works.  

3 - Process Visualization Video Learning

  Even when products aren't clearly visible structures, many companies have found innovative ways to visualize processes through metaphors and parallels. For example, banks like JP Morgan and HSBC have created animations that explain how money or cryptocurrency moves through a financial system by using a visual example of a literal pipeline, following a representation of the money, like a coin, as it visibly moves from one point along the chain to the next. These animations can make abstract concepts more concrete and allow learners to use the visual and auditory parts of their brain to understand these concepts more quickly and effectively.   At Ozemio we've used many of these techniques and more to help clients make impactful video and animation training modules that improve learning and increase memory retention. If you're interested in looking for ways to boost your eLearning initiatives, you can find out more about us on our website here and contact us for a free consultation with an eLearning expert or sample case studies to show the kind of work we've done for companies like yours.