Introduction
Learning videos are an effective tool that can help you deliver educational content to audiences while also keeping the material engaging and fun to watch. The creation of both engaging and informative educational videos, though, requires extensive experience in this field and carrying out all the production steps in a particular order.
In today’s blog, we’ll show how to make an educational video that not only looks good but can also reach its projected goals 🚀
Summary:
- Before Creating Educational Videos, It’s Important to Keep in Mind Certain Points
- Making Educational Videos That Actually Work
- How to Make Educational Videos: 3 Main Steps to Follow
- Ways to Make Educational Videos More Engaging and Captivating
- How Long Does It Take to Make an Educational Video
- How Much Does It Cost to Make an Educational Video
- Blue Carrot Experience in Making Educational Videos
- Final Thoughts
Before Creating Educational Videos, It’s Important to Keep in Mind These Points
Setting Project Goals
Having a clear understanding of what you want to achieve with your project will allow you to select visual tools and engagement techniques that will fit your expectations the best. You need to define the outcomes you want your video to produce and determine if you want your viewers to learn new information, acquire certain skills, or maybe practice what they already know.
Aside from that, setting clear goals can help you define the appropriate level of knowledge depth for your video or course and outline the core messages. For more about these aspects and how to draw and make educational videos, read our e-learning video guide:
Establishing Course Structure
In the case of educational video courses where you need to produce hours of content, it’s important to have a clear course structure organized beforehand. All the content needs to be broken down into manageable chunks or sections and presented in a logical sequence to the learner. That’s how you ensure they will be able to follow and understand the material, and what’s more important, is that your video will be able to perform as expected.
Engaging with SMEs
Educational videos and video courses may deal with difficult topics, statistics, scientific facts to support the statements, and so on. Obviously, such information has to come from someone — likely Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in particular.
Aside from providing actual content for your educational video, SMEs can also give you an understanding of how to work with complex subjects to make sure they get presented in an easy-to-understand way to a learner. By doing so not only will you be able to make your video informative but also engaging and interesting to watch — even if it’s not a full-size e-learning course, but just a short explainer video:
Making Educational Videos That Actually Work
All effective educational videos get created with a specific goal in mind — to produce an outcome that can be measured or observed. So, let’s go over some basic tips that can help ensure your video can do that.
Aligning Type of a Video With Your Goals
When making educational videos, companies often prioritize the visual side of the project over everything else. While we by no means want to diminish the importance of a quality-looking image, the project goals should define which visuals and types of video are chosen in the first place.
In video production, when illustrating some simple concepts, going with a whiteboard animation would be more than enough, while other more complex subjects may demand a higher level of detail or accuracy, which whiteboard animation simply cannot offer.
Without aligning the video type with project goals beforehand, you may come to realize halfway through that the video type doesn’t actually fit and won’t work for all aspects of your subject. To keep that from happening choose tools that fit your goals best.
Briefing Process is a Must
When working with large projects — educational video courses — it may be tempting to skip some stages that are often considered ‘secondary ones’, especially if your budget or timeframes are limited. For example, some consider the briefing stage a lower priority, and drop it. However, it is one of the most important parts that can literally make or break your project.
The main goal of this stage is to help clients and a production team identify the core messages of the project and give all the parties involved a deeper understanding of the future video. It serves as a foundation for the project, helping to set the general direction for the script scenario, style, and type of video.
👉 For more about the importance of the briefing process read our article here.
Proactive Cooperation
This aspect is extremely important when working with the production team. For the project to successfully reach the finish line, cooperation on it should never be one-sided, but rather go both ways. For a video to meet the projected goals, it’s necessary that the client actively participates in the production process and provides timely feedback to a team.
No matter how experienced or professional a team is, without the relevant information from the client, they won’t be able to design an educational video that 100% meets the goals set. This also applies to the team itself — when looking for a video agency for your project, pay attention to how proactive they are.
How to Make Educational Videos: 3 Main Steps to Follow
The production of any educational video includes numerous steps, which normally get organized into three main stages: pre-production, production, and post-production. Let’s take a look at each of them to show you how we make educative videos at Blue Carrot.
Pre-production Stage
We’ve already covered some of the pre-production steps above, when talking about what needs to be done before the project starts. Aside from that, during the pre-production stage, it’s necessary to establish evaluation methods, define content delivery methods, and facilitate instructional design. This includes editing the information from SMEs, scriptwriting, and establishing technical requirements for all the media content that is to be produced.
Production Stage
At this stage, the team decides on the visual stylistics of the project and develops an animation sample and all the visual assets that will be present in the final video. This includes the production of brand identity elements, storyboards, illustrations, animation, voiceover, etc. Each of these components are explored in depth in our e-learning video production guide, so make sure to check it out too.
Post-production Stage
During the final stage of education video production, the team carries out QA sessions, does final edits, and makes sure that the video complies with particular standards (accessibility requirements for example) — depending on the region the video is produced for or specific requests provided by a client.
👉 When talking about QA, it’s necessary to note that when working with a professional video agency, these sessions also normally occur throughout the entire production process. So, when your project gets to the final stage, there should be only minor edits or adjustments left since everything has already been polished earlier.
Ways to Make Educational Videos More Engaging and Captivating
Highlight Important Messages
Highlighting core messages is your ultimate goal when it comes to the production of educational content. By doing so, you can draw the viewer’s attention to particular ideas and key concepts as well as help them organize the information in an intuitive manner.
There are several ways you can actually highlight such messages in your video. You could use captions, visual cues (such as arrows, boxes, bold colors, etc.), and even pauses in a video to separate the main messages from the rest of the content.
Break Large Chunks of Information Into Smaller Bits
By breaking the information into smaller and more manageable chunks you help learners to focus on specific concepts or ideas so they absorb the material better. Organizing educational courses in 6-10 minute long videos lowers the intrinsic load (i.e. the complexity of a subject itself) for the learners and makes sure they won’t get overwhelmed. It also allows them to better organize the information in their minds.
In addition, such content organization gives course designers wider opportunities when it comes to engagement of learners with the material — via quizzes, tests, and interactive exercises that can be presented to them in between videos.
Use The Same Language As Your Audience
When creating educational videos not only is it important for learners to understand the presented material, but also to establish a connection with them. You want your learners to feel that the course instructor is speaking directly to them and is giving them something that they can relate to.
One of the ways of doing that is by using a more conversational tone and presenting material to the audience in a way that would actually make sense to them — this may be through examples that are relatable to their past experiences, for example. This will help to increase the relevance of course material and its applicability in the eyes of your audience.
Practice Active Learning
Active Learning can help to drastically improve the effectiveness of your educational or instructional videos. This approach involves engaging learners through different activities to encourage them to practice, analyze, or simply reflect on the course subject.
We touched on this point above when talking about breaking information into manageable parts and introducing various tests, quizzes, etc. — and these are exactly the activities that help to promote Active Learning. They ensure that learners don’t just remain passive recipients of information, but become active participants in the educational process.
By going through various questionnaires and exercises, learners can get a deeper understanding of the subject and gain the needed knowledge (or skill) faster.
How Long Does It Take to Make an Educational Video
Video projects vary by length, size, complexity, and type. Some may come in the form of live footage — ‘talking head’ kind of videos — with basic animation overlays, while others may come with complex 3D sequences and animated characters. So, there really is no concrete answer for how long would it take to make an educational video. Some projects can be produced within a few weeks, others may be in production for months.
However, there are ways you can determine the delivery timeline for your project. Let’s say your video involves the production of 50 custom illustrations. Ask your artist to create 1-2 of those first and see how much time it takes to create them. This will give you an idea of how long it will take to do the whole batch. By assessing production stages individually you’ll be able to get the general timeline picture.
How Much Does It Cost to Make an Educational Video
As with the length of time required for a video production, it’s hard to answer how much does it cost to make an educational video. Each project is unique and comes with different requirements. In general, though, when talking about the cost of creating educational videos with a professional agency, the project budget will depend on three main aspects:
- Complexity of the project subject — before the project starts, an agency needs to get familiar with the project subject. So the more complex the subject is, the more time a production team will need to spend to come up with the storyboard, course scenario, and so on.
- Type of video — the price tag for the production of the simplest animation type (like motion-graphics) normally starts at $250 per minute and may go up to $500-750 per minute for animation with characters and even to $10,000 per minute for a complex 3D animation. Live shooting would differ depending on the region and might start from $3,500 per hour for the cheapest recording (plus post-production.) AI-generated content would cost less than that, around $700 per hour.
- Extra requirements — these can be anything from additional localization to the production of illustrations in different formats, preparation of the source files, and recording of multiple voiceovers.
These are the main factors that will influence your project expenses. For more information on how the project budget gets formed and how to create an educational video, make sure to check our complete educational video production guide.
👉 You can also use our video production costs estimator if you want to get an estimate for a marketing project, for example. But remember that the pricing for the e-learning video will be much lower.
Blue Carrot Experience in Making Educational Videos
🔹 IRI
For the International Republican Institute (IRI), our team produced 50+ minutes of educational content on the development of a democratic society. The video course featured various types of animation, including whiteboard, screencast-like sequences, and animated overlays.
With this project our goal was to turn the subject of numerous political concepts and ideas into something interesting to watch, while also making sure that the videos serve their educational purpose as well. In total, we produced 34 minutes of whiteboard animation, 24 minutes of animation overlays, 5 minutes of live-shooting, and also created 26 illustrations.
🔹 U.S. university
For one of the top U.S. universities, our e-learning video production company created a series of educational videos on innovations in healthcare. The main challenge with this project was very tight deadlines. To make sure that we are capable of delivering the project on time, we significantly reinforced our resources and produced 200+ minutes of animated overlays and other visuals within the requested time frame, all without compromising the quality of the final result.
Final Thoughts
All educational videos come in different forms and sizes, but what always separates an effective video from an ineffective one is structure, adherence to clear learning objectives, quality visuals, and engaging storytelling.
By focusing on these characteristics and with the help of a professional team, it is possible to create a video that engages learners and conveys even the most complex information in a clear and effective manner.
If you need more information on how to make a good educational video, or need to produce your own learning project, feel free to reach our team via the form below, and our managers will get in touch with you in no time! 👇
