Introduction
Finding an e-learning video solutions company may not seem difficult these days — with all the instruments and platforms, and hundreds of offers on the market, hiring an e-learning video solutions agency can be done in a matter of hours.
At first, that may be how it looks, but how do you ensure that you partner with a reliable team? How to know — aside from their own claims — that they really know how to work with e-learning projects? How can you ensure that they won’t fail just when the slightest challenge appears on the horizon? These and other questions we will try to answer in today’s post 👨🎓
Summary
- Pay attention to these 4 things while choosing e-learning video solutions provider
- 4 tips how to choose e-learning video solutions partner
- What makes a good e-learning video solution company?
- How Blue Carrot can empower your e-learning project
- Final thoughts
Pay attention to these 4 things while choosing e-learning video solutions provider
There are a lot of aspects and nuances to keep in mind when choosing a video solutions provider for e-learning projects, and for obvious reasons, we can’t cover them all within just a single article. However, to make sure you get a basic understanding of the main hiring principles, here are four aspects that we recommend focusing on:
1. Specific relevant experience
This is literally the №1 thing you want a provider of e-learning video solutions to have. If a team has past experience producing e-learning projects, knows how to correctly define learning goals, choose the most appropriate project format, create course programs, etc., you have a higher chance of getting a video that will engage your target audience.
Even if you have the course program already written out, getting help from a team with relevant expertise will significantly ease the process and make it more efficient.
However, if you need to produce a learning project from scratch, partnering with a professional e-learning video production company becomes even more critical. The e-learning niche has its challenges and requirements. For example, working with a team that only knows how to produce promotional videos can be a complete miss as they may not be aware of particular nuances of developing script scenarios for e-learning projects.
2. Polished workflows for mass production
E-learning videos usually get produced in a series, with the shortest one being about 10 minutes long on average, and the longest up to 10 hours. As you see, the length of e-learning videos differs drastically compared to the size of your standard explainer video.
This is why it’s extremely important to find a team not only with the relevant expertise but with a sufficient number of resources (team-wise) and polished workflows that will be able to deliver a lot of video content on 1) scale, 2) time, and 3) your budget.
👉 When we’re talking about e-learning projects we mean mass production, so it’s better to find a team capable of managing and carrying out large projects effectively. No matter whether it’s ten minutes or ten hours, you don’t want to wait for months for content to be produced.
3. Areas of expertise
We can’t stress enough the importance of wide expertise for a production agency. Regardless of whether we’re talking about e-learning projects, promotional videos, or some other formats, expertise is vital. The wider the expertise an agency has, the more options it can offer you in terms of video types, styles, production processes, or even additional services.
So, when selecting an e-learning video solutions provider, determine whether the team is capable of covering all types of tasks within your project scope. What types of animation they can work with, can they carry out live video recording for you, or produce online courses with the help of such authoring tools as Articulate. And what about post-production — can they do it for you?
👉 Very often e-learning videos also require localization into different languages, so it’s better to have an e-learning video solutions provider who can produce multilingual voiceovers.
4. QA testing
Another important aspect is whether your potential e-learning video solutions partner carries the QA testing. Video production is a complex process and mistakes happen there too. But if an education video solutions provider has established QA policies, all the small edits, mistakes and polishings will be dealt with before a video is sent out for the review by the client.
Another area where QA testing becomes an absolute must is localization. Let’s say a team produced a script for your project in a language you don’t know personally. How do you ensure that no mistakes were made? Do they have a native speaker, for example, who can proofread the text copy to ensure that all is correct?
As a client, you may not even know about all these nuances, and what’s more, you don’t even need to if you partner with a professional e-learning production agency.
4 tips how to choose e-learning video solutions partner
1. Ask right questions
We have already touched on some of the questions that you should ask your potential e-learning video solutions provider during an interview. Listing each and every possible question may take us a century and a half to do, so we think it’s better to give you a general idea of what to look for.
In the first place, try to understand how the company will carry out your project. Who will be responsible for what, how the communication will go, what agency can do and can’t, who will own the copyright, risk mitigation policies, and so on and so forth. You want all the answers to be specific to give you a complete picture of how an e-learning project will be carried out, from start to finish.
2. Don’t go for the lowest price
Another problem when choosing a video production partner is falling for the lowest price. While we totally understand that e-learning projects are much larger than the average animated videos, and course developers don’t want to burn holes in their pockets while creating hours of video content, it’s still important not to sacrifice quality for budget.
If you manage to partner with a professional team, they will be able to deliver a great-looking course even on a modest budget. Plus, in video production, the longer video gets, the lower the price goes.
👉 For more about this, read Explainer Video Production Pricing: Different Video Types and Costs.
3. Know your limitations and requirements
Knowing what you want to get in the end is as important as finding the right team for your project. It’s better to plan everything ahead in order not to find yourself in the middle of the production realizing you’ve chosen the wrong approach or you won’t be able to get to the finish line with the available budget.
Right from the very beginning figure out what you can potentially do, and can’t. Setting your requirements and limitations straight will help to understand what qualities you need to look for in the video production partner.
4. Avoid ‘experts at everything’
Let’s imagine a situation where you start asking questions of your potential production partner and all the answers boil down to one single “yes, we can do it all”. This is a huge red flag, telling you that you might be talking to an unprofessional team. Even with 9+ years in the business, we at Blue Carrot can’t guarantee that we can do everything and anything we’re asked.
Sometimes it might be better to switch to another type of video or adjust the project scope a bit so that the video doesn’t become a waste of client resources and actually meets the project goals. A professional video agency always knows its capabilities as well as limitations and never gives promises it can’t deliver on.
What makes a good e-learning video solution company?
Now that we’ve explained what to avoid when hiring an agency for e-learning video solutions production, let’s look at the qualities of an experienced team.
✔️ Good portfolio of projects
Obviously, this is one of the main characteristics of a professional production agency. A broad portfolio of completed projects is a sign that a team can work with different projects in terms of style, type, size, etc. An important detail we recommend looking for is not only the final videos themselves, but also project descriptions that provide insights into how the team handled each project, what challenges there were, and so on.
✔️ High communication skills
Communication is a significant part of the process, so you want to make sure that a team is able to respond to your requests in a timely manner. You want to know who will be responsible for communication, handling emergency situations, etc. In a professional team, a dedicated person will always be assigned to your project. They will be the one you can reach out to for updates or to get questions answered.
✔️ Transparent production policies
With a professional team, you know what is happening with your project at any given point in time. You have a complete understanding of all the processes, know what comes after each step, and thus have confidence that a project is being developed according to your expectations.
✔️ Flexibility
E-learning projects all come with different requirements. Sometimes your timeline may be very limited and when that’s the case, a professional team will always be able to scale its resources to deliver your project on time. In addition to that, if during the project production, you decide to adjust the scope a little bit, a professional team will always come up with a few suggestions on how to do that without damaging the project quality or delivery timeline.
How Blue Carrot can empower your e-learning project
All the findings described in this article so far come from our own experience. Working through dozens of projects in different niches and markets, we know all the ins and outs of the production process and can help companies avoid the most common pitfalls.
When working on educational programs and video courses, we always focus on the core learning goals to make sure that the final learning video performs as effectively as possible and delivers the needed knowledge to its viewers.
We are a full-cycle video production company and thus are able to work in most popular video formats and animation types. Our team is ready to help with your project, no matter the size or complexity. To see examples of our work, check our portfolio, as well as the following e-learning video showreel:
Final thoughts
Choosing the right provider of video solutions for e-learning projects requires consideration of such factors as experience, quality of the portfolio, production policies, and area of expertise. You want to ensure that not only can they deliver a great-looking video, but one that can help meet the educational goals of your project.
Obviously, with each project, there will be additional aspects to take into account when choosing an e-learning video solutions agency. But with the tips above, you will be able to go through this stage as smoothly as possible.
