In the past few years, there has been a sharp increase in the use of video among large organizations. Following the YouTube trend, companies have become fascinated with the potential for harvesting stories from employees and customers. The learning power of short videos with focused stories is clear:
- It provides an illustrative method of delivering content.
- It’s a trusted method of adding context to content.
- It demonstrates the voice of the customer or the “field.”
- It allows for globalization of current best practices.
Making these videos is getting simple: Use either a flip-cam or low-cost camera and edit down any clip to a few minutes of wisdom.
What is not so simple is deciding where to store this video, how to make it discoverable and what to track about usage. Ideally, these clips would be accessible on demand by workers and also available for deployment by an instructional designer or classroom instructor. Sometimes an organization will want to formally assign a video as a learning object to be part of a goal-based learning course or activity. Other times, the learner might want to access the video as a form of performance support. A few videos might take on “viral” status and travel quickly around the global enterprise.
I recently scanned our Learning Consortium to find out how these global organizations were storing and managing video for learning. Learning leaders reported using a mix of:
- Learning management systems (LMSs).
- Learning content management systems (LCMSs).
- Collaborative and corporate environments, such as SharePoint.
- Point solution video servers, like a corporate YouTube.
I was surprised to find that almost every organization was frustrated with its current method for storing and serving video. Most were either hoping for new video deployment functionality from a learning system or were starting to shop for a solution. The following is a collective wish list based on their comments.
1. Video tagging: Learning organizations want to make video as discoverable as possible. Unlike text or PDF files, video is not normally searchable by a search engine. While there are some interesting experiments in research institutions, currently the only way to enable search is to apply keywords or metadata tags to files. Learning leaders would like to have this process supported and assisted, providing tagging at the point of origination and allowing for enhancement by users along the way.
2. Discoverability: Let’s make video discoverable from multiple points. Ideally, a worker would be able to access a video by searching the corporate intranet, from a learning portal page, from a list of “hot” videos and even from within a performance review system. Learners should not have to formally log in to a system in order to access the video.
3. Ratings: Learners should have the ability to add comments and ratings. Users should be able to use these ratings on a global basis or in slices based on a trusted reference group. For example, a learner might want to find out which videos on the topic of delegation have the highest ratings from senior managers in non-North American subsidiaries.
4. Tracking: Learning executives want to be able to design the tracking levels and styles for diverse uses of video. For example, for compliance purposes, there may be videos where each person’s use and completion is tracked and recorded at a detailed level. Other times, we may wish to track the type of usage for a particular video, but not at a granular level. In fact, we may want to let the user know that it is not being tracked.
5. Clips of clips: Sometimes there is a one-minute segment of a 15-minute video that a manager or learner wants to use. Can a timeline exist that allows the reference of just one minute — in the middle of the clip — to create a smaller “cliplet”?
We are quite interested in competition among diverse systems to provide homes for video in organizations’ IT infrastructures. Hopefully LMS and LCMS providers will rapidly and inexpensively add this functionality to their installed databases. We are experimenting with how SharePoint and Google Apps might be used for this, while externally hosted community software such as Communispace and Jive will also be competing for this about-to-expand market.
No matter which system is selected, it is critical for chief learning officers to advocate for a flexible and robust capability to empower business units to leverage the power of video for learning, knowledge and culture.