Panopto Video Platform

From online presentations and on-demand training to live event streaming and employee-generated content, video is beginning to transform the way businesses share knowledge and communicate.

Yet as enterprises grapple with the challenges of how to manage video-based learning and communications at scale, universities are already recording tens of thousands of hours of video every semester, and deploying campus-wide video learning solutions overnight.

While there can be several challenges to deploying video in a large organization, three in particular stand out as technology hurdles that need to be resolved simply to enable video inside a company’s network and IT environment.

So what are the 3 key IT challenges to video that a decade of experience has taught universities how to handle?

Video storage chaos. Universities have brought all of their videos into a single, secure location, greatly simplifying content management
File incompatibility frustrations. Universities have discovered how to allow all of their videos to be viewable and sharable on all of their students’ and employees’ devices—no matter what the file format or device type
Bandwidth capacity concerns. Universities have found several ways to conserve bandwidth—without compromising video availability

Let’s take a deeper look into each.

Challenge #1: Video Storage Chaos

Today most corporations’ video content is scattered across the network on file shares, Sharepoint sites and even employees’ desktop computers. Departmental silos have taken to adopting their own solutions, not thinking of video as a strategic organization-wide asset. As a result, they’re straining network storage capacities, taxing internal bandwidth availability, and missing a major business opportunity: the opportunity to enable large-scale, cross-organizational knowledge sharing.

Solution: A Corporate YouTube

In order to address this problem, educational institutions began thinking about video learning just as corporations think about a company-wide CRM system or consistent security software deployed on employees’ desktops. They brought their department heads and instructors together with IT personnel to arrive at a single unified (and scalable) video platform solution.

That solution: the video content management system (video CMS, sometimes called a “corporate YouTube”). The video CMS is a single, centralized video library that enables videos to be found easily and played on any device.

A video CMS acts as a central repository for existing and new video alike, enabling organizations to automatically upload video files where they won’t strain internal file infrastructure. In turn, the video CMS can then maximize the value of all those videos, optimizing them for playback anytime anywhere on any device, simplifying sharing and discoverability, and indexing the contents of each recording to make the information covered in the videos searchable.

The video CMS has been helping Butler University to enhance its students’ learning experiences since 2009. That’s when the school decided to record skills simulations, student role playing and other interactive learning experiences on a regular basis. The video CMS they deployed for this purpose, Panopto, allows for easy recording, viewing, sharing and storage. As a result, 82 percent of students reported higher exam grades and 67 percent reported an improved ability to retain information.

Forward-thinking companies like Microsoft have seen the light. Microsoft credits its Academy video portal with providing a centralized location for all of the company’s video content, thereby facilitating peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, improving learning, and enabling virtual events — and helping the company to save almost $14 million in its first three years alone.

Challenge #2: File Incompatibility Frustrations

It’s a problem that becomes more complicated with every new device that hits the market. New video recorders produce new video file types. New viewing devices, meanwhile, don’t always accommodate even popular video formats — Apple’s iPhone and iPad, just as one example, famously do not support Flash video. A few short years ago — and for some companies, even today — managing video formatting was enough of a challenge to require companies to dedicate a full-time AV specialist to the task — just to ensure that when an employee found a video, they could actually watch it.

Solution: Automatic Video Transcoding

With the rise of mobile learning and bring-your-own-device (BYOD), businesses are coming to realize that limiting how organizational video can be recorded and viewed isn’t a viable strategy. Instead, they’re taking a cue from colleges and universities that, unable to provide all students with identical systems and devices, have found they can rely on a video platform to ensure broad file type and mobile compatibility.

Washington’s Northwest University is one of those that has successfully met this challenge. The university’s instructors note that students particularly appreciate the Panopto mobile apps that allows them to watch the lectures while on the go — on devices they already own and are already comfortable with.

VCMS Transcoding - Panopto Business Video Platform

With a modern video platform, the days of custom transcoding each video file are over. Modern video platforms like Panopto allow you to upload a huge variety of video formats, including AVI, MP4, MPG, WMV, MOV, QT, ASF, 3GP, WMA, MP3, M4V, GoToMeeting, and more — and then automatically transcodes every video uploaded, so that it can be played back by anyone on any device just minutes later.

Challenge #3: Bandwidth Capacity Concerns

The power of video is that it is a rich, engaging medium perfect for sharing knowledge. Yet the factors that make video so powerful — the combination of visual and audio content — also means video files can quickly require a lot more bandwidth to review than would a traditional document.

This, then, is video’s challenge number five: network capacity issues. Schools and businesses alike need to ensure that they can handle the demand that comes when an organization starts producing and sharing thousands of hours of video every month.

Solution: Adaptive Bitrate Streaming and Multi-Format Video Files

As video files become larger, universities have found automated technology can alleviate the pressure of preserving network bandwidth. That new best practice solution comes in two key forms: adaptive bitrate streaming and multi-format files.

Adaptive streaming allows an organization to use its video CMS to throttle back video quality based on available bandwidth. When bandwidth is limited, viewers are shown their video at a slightly lower bit rate — enough to preserve network bandwidth while still providing the best viewing experience.

Multi-format technology, meanwhile, automatically creates differently formatted videos and audio podcasts of every recording, thereby ensuring that the optimal video is played for each device and connection speed.

Administrators of Northwest University, whose 44 classrooms are all integrated with their video CMS, agree that usability and uniformity are key elements to the success of their system. In particular, the institution notes that its Panopto video content management system delivers completed recordings instantly in an easy-to-use, easy-to-share MP3/ MP4 format — which ensures that students don’t have to wait weeks for lectures to be processed, or invest in proprietary software to view recordings.

“We wanted a solution where the faculty member didn’t have to spend a lot of time making it work,” said Dr. Waldemar Kowalski, a professor and chief information officer of Northwest University. “We also needed a solution that could be delivered to students in a format they could use. Panopto could do all those things for us.”

Find out more!
In our latest white paper, Seven Things Businesses Can Learn From Universities About Video, we describe the seven challenges corporations face when searching for an efficient, effective platform for their business video content management needs — and the solutions universities have found to them all:

Challenge #1: The Hardware Issue
Challenge #2: The Perspective Problem
Challenge #3: Video Storage Chaos
Challenge #4: File Incompatibility Frustrations
Challenge #5: Bandwidth Capacity Concerns
Challenge #6: Live Learning Scalability Struggles
Challenge #7: The Video Search Problem

Download your free copy today!

The post Managing Video At Scale: 3 Things Businesses Can Learn From Universities appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Something big happened in 1998: Google was born. Within just a few short years, internet users went from browsing the web — clicking from one page to the next via links — to actually searching the web. Twenty years later, search remains our go-to strategy for finding out more about virtually everything, from new restaurants nearby to ancient public records.

Then in 2002, another something big: Friendster and LinkedIn both launched, followed in 2003 by MySpace and 2004 by Facebook. In short order, social sites would change not just how we share information and communicate, but also the rate at which new ideas can spread.

Still another something big came about in 2005, when YouTube added streaming online video to the mix and gave us all yet another way to share and acquire information.

And though there had been a number of predecessors, 2007 saw Apple’s launch of the iPhone and the resulting near-instant adoption of the smartphone that put everything in the palms of our hands, 24-hours a day, 7-days a week.

Global Digital Trends at Work

These global digital trends have redefined the way we shop, commute, communicate, and learn. And not only have they changed the way we live, they’ve changed the way we work.

Just as with the new apps that help us become more efficient in our personal lives, technologies that make us more productive and informed at work are rapidly reshaping corporate technology ecosystems. And just as with our personal technologies, today’s changes stem not from top-down executive-driven digital transformations, but employee demand at the grassroots level.

In her highly anticipated 2018 Internet Trends Report — the annual “State of The Union” for the tech industry — Mary Meeker and her team of analysts at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers note two major trends in enterprise technology that illustrate this:

Easy to use consumer-grade apps like Slack, Zoom, and Dropbox have grown rapidly by improving communication and the flow of information at work, appealing directly to the time-strapped end user.
These extensible, worker-driven productivity apps integrate easily into other business systems, better organizing information, connecting teams, providing context, and showing historical data.

At work, we want immediate answers when we need them. Google taught us we could have this back in 1998, and in the years hence, Facebook, YouTube, and Apple only reinforced the lesson.

Finding Time For Learning

Josh Bersin, Principal & Founder, Bersin / Deloitte Consulting and a a leading analyst in the corporate learning space, has been tracking this same trend. His interest, however, isn’t in technology for its own sake; rather, as an evolving facilitator of a macro learning trend he refers to as “learning in the flow of work.”

Learning in the Flow of Work from Josh Bersin

A recent LinkedIn Learning survey of over 4.000 professionals revealed that the number one challenge for talent development is convincing employees to find more time for learning. Bersin’s research confirms that employees dedicate only 1 percent of a typical work week to focus on training and development — just 24 minutes a week.

As a result, more and more learning is happening in the moment, or “in the flow.”

This partly explains the success of productivity tools like Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, and even Panopto. These apps make it possible for workers to tap into institutional knowledge whenever they need to.

Whether it comes directly from a co-worker on Slack or Panopto, or from documentation stored in Dropbox or Google Drive, the bottom line is that most employees will go to wherever they believe they’ll be able to get the fastest access to the information they need. But how do we make sure they find what they need when they get there?

Supporting Learning In the Flow of Work

In today’s organizations, the role of learning and development (L&D) teams has expanded to encompass not only formal employee training, but to supporting a variety of forms of informal social learning and knowledge exchange as well.

Today’s L&D professional is both creator and curator, supporting the programs and systems that make serendipitous learning moments possible. This includes not only creating flexible on-demand formal training content, but also ensuring institutional knowledge from experts within the organization is archived and retained.

And that means when it comes to supporting learning in the flow of work, L&D practitioners must focus not only on the “learning” aspect, but on the “in the flow of work” element as well.

By way of example, let’s consider your sales team.

In all likelihood, every member of the team lives in Salesforce. So If you’re building a system that enables learning on-demand for your sales team, it needs to plug into Salesforce to make training topics easily discoverable.

Here’s how this might work: Imagine you’ve recorded a series of soft-skills training modules intended to coach your reps on their customer interactions. You also encourage sales reps to record quick knowledge dumps on their smartphones that might help other reps close deals, and you curate the best of those to share with the team.

Of course, just creating the content is step 1. You have to put it somewhere others can access it. So for your sales team, you’re hosting the videos in your corporate YouTube, which integrates with Salesforce to make video-based knowledge searchable (every word spoken and every word shown on screen) right within your Salesforce CRM. The rest of your knowledge base — PowerPoints, PDFs, and other text-based documentation — is organized in Dropbox, which also integrates with Salesforce to become searchable in that system.

Now comes the test.

One of your sales reps is working an account that should be a quick win, but a competitor is pitching too and your rep is having trouble getting the sale to close. Because your video knowledge-base is integrated with Salesforce, when that rep types in a search for “overcoming objections,” your video training module on the topic appears and she watches it. She then searches Salesforce for the competitor’s name, which returns a point-by-point teardown of your product versus the competitor that the marketing team uploaded to Dropbox. She also finds a few videos uploaded to your corporate YouTube from other reps that talk about deals they closed when they were up against that same competitor.

Without ever leaving the familiar environment of Salesforce, your salesperson can study the teardown, watch videos from the other reps, and prepare herself to go into the next client meeting ready to move the deal forward.

Today’s top learning organizations have already begun to architect digital ecosystems that enable learning in the flow of work, just like in the example scenario above. The applications that make up these ecosystems not only integrate seamlessly with each other but also support the discovery of knowledge and quick learning from anywhere.

As Bersin’s noted, “These applications all build on the 20 years of infrastructure we’ve built (search, video, mobile, recommendations, and fast internet access) and add the principles of spaced learning, designed repetition, practice, and competency-driven recommendations right into an employee’s work environment.”

The strategy and execution will be different for every organization, of course, but the goal is the same: embed flexible learning content into the platform(s) in which your people work the most to maximize the training they get as they are working. All together, that will mean that no matter what problems these apps solve for workers in your organization, they’ll also help you build an infrastructure that supports on-demand, searchable, mobile-ready, video-based learning that can be accessed from the tools they already use most.

Support Learning In The Flow Of Work With A Video Platform

It’s no longer a secret that supporting rapid video-based learning is a top priority for many of the world’s best learning organizations. But as businesses record more and more video, they often realize that the systems they are using to manage and share videos are broken.

An enterprise video platform can ensure that your company is able to securely manage video-enabled learning and communications at scale, but it needs to be intuitive, flexible, and extensible.

If you’re looking to adopt a video platform in order to enable both the creation and management of videos that support learning in the flow of work, be sure to check out our free white paper that guides you through sourcing the best software for your business.

DOWNLOAD: The Top 10 Questions To Ask In A Video Platform RFP

The post When There Isn’t Time For Learning, You Learn “In The Flow Of Work” appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Think about the last time you gave a live presentation. You probably just got up in front of an audience, started your PowerPoint presentation, and presented. Pretty straightforward.

Ideally, when you create and share an online video presentation, the process shouldn’t be much different. At some point, you’ll need to start a recording of your presentation since you’ll be sharing it on-demand, but other than that, you shouldn’t have to change the way you present.

Unfortunately, most online presentation tools don’t work this way. Often, you’re forced to break out of your normal presentation rhythm and adapt to the way the online presentation tool works. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Many online presentation tools, for example, require you to first upload your slides to a server and wait for them to get processed. That creates a needless delay to starting your presentation, and even worse, some online presentation tools lose all of your slide animations during processing.

After your slides have been processed, those systems then require you to present them from inside a web browser, rather than using the presentation software you’re already familiar with like PowerPoint or Keynote.

Other online presentation tools offer another problem. They allow you to record your actual PowerPoint presentation, but then, they just give you a video file as output. It’s up to you to figure out how to share that file with your audience, and to ensure that the video is formatted in a way so that your audience can view it on their laptops, tablets, or smart phones.

Panopto has taken a different approach.

We wanted to make sure that creating and sharing online presentations was as straightforward as giving a live presentation. Here’s all you have to do with Panopto:

Launch our recording software
Click the “Record” button
Give your PowerPoint presentation
Click the “Stop” button

While you’re giving your PowerPoint presentation, here’s what Panopto does for you in the background:

Records your PowerPoint presentation in up to 1080p HD.
Records you presenting (using your webcam or any other camera) in up to 720p HD.
Automatically ingests all of the text from your PowerPoint slides.
From your PowerPoint text, Panopto creates a table of contents for your viewers.
Panopto also creates a searchable index of your presentation, allowing your viewers to search inside your video presentation for any word mentioned on your slides.
Panopto automatically uploads your video presentation to your secure video library.
Converts your video presentation so that your audience can view it on any laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Finally, Panopto emails you a link to your video presentation that you can share with your audience.

Rather than adapt your presentation style and workflow to Panopto, we’ve built a tool that adapts to you. Which means you can focus on your presentation, not on the presentation technology.

Try Panopto’s Online Video Presentation Software Today

For more information on how we can help your business or academic institution create and share online presentations, contact our team to request a free trial of our software.

The post The Fastest Way to Create and Share Online Presentations appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

In a recent guest blog post, we covered the use of Panopto at Birkbeck, University of London for formative assessment in Earth and Planetary Sciences. We caught up with one of the academic staff members involved in the project to use video for assessment in Geology – Steve Hirons – to find out if he had gained any further insights into best practices when using video for student recording and assessment.

Steve recaps the initial project and shares an early lesson learned with us here.

The background – changing assessment practices at Birkbeck, University of London

At Birkbeck we’ve been actively looking at ways to develop student feedback and assessment practices. Academics have been working with Learning Technologists at the institution to trial a range of new pedagogical approaches. Panopto is one of the technologies we thought we could use to deliver innovative methods of video assessment for our BSc Geology students. Rather than seeing it purely as a lecture capture tool, we could see a lot of potential to use Panopto’s recording functionality to enable students to create their own videos.

In a related case study I worked on with my colleague Deborah Grange (which was also published in a recent ebook via the Bloomsbury Learning Environment), we outlined the vital need we had to upgrade our ability to help our Geology students prepare for their final verbal assessment.

For our students to succeed, they need to master a fundamental skill – the ability to describe rocks in fine detail. 50% of their summative exam for some modules depends on this skill. Ultimately, the final assessment of their degree is a ‘viva voce’, or verbal presentation, with a professional geologist.

Up until recently, we’d just been preparing students for this examination by getting them to do written assessments, but Panopto opened up new possibilities.

We decided to replace the written assessment format and ask our students to record verbal commentaries to visuals of different types of rocks. These recordings were uploaded to our secure Panopto video content management system and could be accessed by the other students within the cohort to aid peer reflection and collaboration.

Student reactions to video assessment

When we introduced this change, the students who participated reported three benefits:

They felt much more confident in their ability to describe rocks.
They told us they had been more organised in creating their descriptions, knowing they would be recorded.
Distance learners felt that this had greatly improved the inclusivity of the course for them.

While most of the students were eager to embrace the new approach (if a little apprehensive at first, due to understandable nerves), I did encounter one student who didn’t want to use video for her assessment in this way (although for privacy reasons, I won’t share her name here). When I asked her why she wasn’t keen to do so, she said that she lacked confidence in public speaking, did not want the other students to be able to review her work, and felt disadvantaged as English was not her first language. While I was disappointed that she didn’t want to try the new approach to assessment, I accepted her reasons and she did not complete the video element of the assignment.

However, after she recently had her viva voce with an external examiner, she came to me with a much-changed attitude.

Having felt nervous and tongue-tied during the viva, she realised that the video assessment would have been hugely beneficial in helping her to prepare more effectively and face some of her fears. With hindsight, she agreed that she should have done the video assessment. More than that, she said that based on her lesson learned, we should make this a compulsory element of the course. She felt that mandating the presentational element, or even formally assessing it prior to the external examination would help push reluctant students out of their comfort zone, but for their ultimate benefit. She also encouraged me to share her story, so others could learn from it.

As a teacher, this was an important lesson for me too.

While, of course, we must be mindful of student wishes and expectations, we also need to remember that as instructors, we have a duty to help students obtain the best outcomes possible. Sometimes, this may mean finding new ways to help some students overcome any reluctance they may have to trying new approaches.

It is also all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that students are inherently more comfortable with technology, but this is not always the case. As we begin to experiment with unfamiliar pedagogies, we need to be equally as creative in our approaches to engage with students so they understand why we might be implementing particular learning strategies and how it will help them.

This student’s changed view has inspired me even more strongly to continue with this method of formative assessment and encourage hesitant students more effectively in the future. How will I do this? Here are three key ways I think I can improve on this moving forward:

Relay the story of the reluctant student with a link to a video account she has created of the change in her perspective.
Add some comments from the external examiners regarding the apparent nervousness of the students in their viva voce assessments.
Talk through any apprehension students feel in class and be much more explicit as to why this exercise is being done and how it will help the students.

Next steps with assessment and video

I have now begun to think about new ways in which we can use Panopto to help enhance the student learning experience. I think there is a great application for the platform when students are developing their individual mapping skills during their Map and Thesis module. This is a compulsory part of their degree during which they have to go to a field area and prepare a geological map from their own detailed observations. They spend over 30 days doing this and it is not always possible for staff to visit students when they are undertaking this task.

By using Panopto, the students could record a video of their fieldwork observations with their geological interpretation outlined verbally. They could then upload the recording to the video content management system so that the relevant member of staff could watch it and send feedback while the student is still in the field. This process would both help address any difficulties students face when interpreting the geology and reinforce the skill of talking about geological theories in preparation for their final viva voce exam.

As Panopto works very well on smartphones, it would be an incredible asset if used in this way.

Not using Panopto’s industry-leading video learning platform yet? Request a free trial today and see how Panopto can open the door to new teaching methodologies that enhance the learning experience for your students.

The post Student Recording And Video Assessments appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Today, businesses have everything they need to significantly improve the way their people communicate — they just don’t know it yet.

From presentations and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, to formal training and executive communications — even flipped meetings and performance reviews that are sent over distance — the possibilities for enhancing employee learning and internal communications are nearly unlimited … once the challenges of video are overcome.

The path to effective video use, however, has already been drawn. Businesses can look to today’s leading universities for examples of how to leverage video in the workplace — and for best practices to solving the challenges of producing videos at scale.

In this space we’ve already looked into how universities have learned to solve 3 technical challenges to using video — today, we’re looking at the other side of organizational video, to see how academia has learned how to approach common hurdles to producing and using video at scale, including:

The hardware issue. Universities have discovered how to successfully do away with expensive A/V equipment and personnel—without compromising video quality
The perspective problem. Universities have learned how to record video from multiple locations and sources, easily blending them together into a single unified presentation
Live learning scalability struggles. Universities are able to increase or reduce their video platform usage to accommodate changing needs
The video search problem. Universities provide their users with a way to keyword search across the video library as well as within individual videos, greatly increasing discoverability

Let’s again take a deeper look into each.

Challenge #1: The Hardware Issue

The first challenge to maintaining an effective, efficient video platform is this: specialized A/V hardware — the kind of hardware traditionally required for video creation such as professional video cameras and microphones — is expensive. And even for companies with the budget to purchase all that equipment and maintain a dedicated A/V team, that “specialist-required” video creation model is still nearly impossible to scale to meet the needs of larger and geographically dispersed organizations.

The good news is that today, most companies already have almost all of the hardware they need to create high quality, highly reliable videos — they just don’t know it yet.

How can this be? These days, software running on any laptop can do what only dedicated appliances could do in the past. Webcams offer 1080p recording and even the smartphones carried around in everyone’s pockets shoot incredibly high quality video. The hardware companies already have available is ready to replace most of that specialized A/V equipment for almost every organizational video use case — as soon as the right software solution is in place.

Solution: Simple Hardware, Powerful Software

At The American University in Cairo, there are no camcorders, no fancy microphones, no A/V team. Yet 139 of the professors there record their lectures in full for students to review on demand. That’s the modern state of lecture capture, and some university administrators believe that soon, it will no longer be an interesting trend — it’ll be the norm.

Businesses, too, are catching on. Sales demonstrations, in-class training sessions, and face-to-face meetings are routinely recorded, automatically uploaded to the video platform and available immediately for review. Remote employees are able to catch up easily, while employees that were there can experience it again. Sales teams use the videos to review their performance, new employees use it for onboarding and training purposes, and all employees use it as a central knowledge base, both creating their own videos and watching those made by their peers.

The best part: you can do it all with a standard laptop, its onboard webcam, and an enterprise video platform software — no special AV expertise required.

One global industrial engineering firm has already put this best practice to use, using the company’s Panopto video platform to record a full 3-day, 30+ session training conference this way. With only a webcam, a mic, and their presenters’ own laptops, the company captured more than 30 original, high-quality videos, all with notes, slides, and indexed content, and — and made them all available for employees to view on-demand within one week of the event closing.

All told, the firm reports the solution was both dramatically faster and significantly more affordable than its previous practice of contracting with AV production specialists. In fact, the first implementation of this “lecture capture for training events” process was so successful, the company was named a 2014 CIO 100 Award winner for innovation, and has made recording with its video platform the company’s standard approach for capturing internal events.

Challenge #2: The Perspective Problem

The second major challenge of video has to do with the complexity of the recording process itself.

Until now, recording even a simple training course or presentation was difficult, expensive and time-consuming — particularly if you wanted to record multiple viewpoints (a slide deck, a presenter, and don’t forget the whiteboard!). Then, once the video was recorded, editing, formatting, and processing it could take weeks to complete and usually required an experienced videographer.

Solution: Multi-Camera and Distributed Recording

So how have schools overcome this issue? “Distributed recording” or “multi-camera recording,” facilitated by a video platform.

Multi-camera recording is, quite simply, exactly what is sounds like. Some video platforms enable users to connect multiple video recording devices to a single laptop — allowing one camera to capture the speaker, another to focus on a whiteboard, still another to show a demonstration, and the video platform itself to record the slides or other information shown on the laptop screen. The platform automatically syncs all those video streams, and can allow viewers to switch between them as they play back the recording.

For larger spaces where it may be impractical (or downright impossible) to connect every camera to one laptop, distributed recording offers another solution.

With distributed recording, two or more separate laptops or mobile devices can each record separate video streams into the same recording. All feeds are then automatically uploaded to the video platform immediately following the presentation where they’re synchronized. With distributed recording, the two videos being recorded know about each other even though they’re not wired together. The end result is seamless — viewers can see both video streams in a video presentation. And it all happens automatically, with no post-production required.

Watch a multi-camera video recorded with Panopto:

At Aberystwyth University in the UK, professors record their own lectures using their own laptops. Instructors are able to integrate PowerPoint slides, web content, photos—anything they want to present along with the lecture.

In the early days, noted Nigel Thomas, desktop services technical support team leader for Aberystwyth University, “We had a number of academic staff members that were requesting us to record events and we would record the audio from the event. We’d then have to get the PowerPoint slides and use another product to marry the audio and slides. That was a very time consuming and resource-heavy prospect. It was not scalable at all.” Today, lecture capture at the school is a simple matter of pressing a “record” button on a laptop — the school’s Panopto video platform takes care of recording anything and everything from there.

Challenge #3: Live Learning Scalability Struggles

A fair amount of corporate video-based learning today comes in the form of webinars, with solutions like Zoom, BlueJeans, or GoToMeeting. Universities too use these tools for live distance learning.

While webinar solutions may work well for real-time interactive discussions involving small groups, caps on the available number attendees can create real issues with scalability. Organizations looking to host large-scale live web events involving thousands or tens of thousands of viewers need a different solution.

Solution: Live Webcasting Technology

The solution many universities have found to this dilemma is live webcasting. While webcasting doesn’t allow the same level of two-way interaction as webinars do, it does allow for sharing of a live stream to virtually any size audience — even tens or hundreds of thousands.

Webcasting allows organizations to broadcast live video over the internet, offering a tool to supplement existing webinars and reach a significantly larger audience. For schools, it’s the perfect solution to streaming symposiums, conferences, and sporting events. Many businesses are finding it’s likewise a smart way to share training sessions, expert panels, industry events, and investor relations calls too.

Best of all, webcasting is easy. With Panopto, there’s no separate webcasting workflow — anyone recording a video is able to simply click “Record and Webcast” from their recorder window and share a live webcast with any audience they choose.

Challenge #4: The Video Search Problem

The final challenge is a straightforward one: Most video is impossible to search. Most video platforms are limited to indexing only metadata like titles and descriptions manually added after a recording is uploaded — not the actual content spoken or shown in the video. Any detail not noted in that additional metadata is lost to search — and becomes essentially invisible.

This is a challenge felt especially in university and corporate settings. Often these organizations record 30 or 60 minutes of video or more, covering dozens of details and ideas. In those cases, it’s essential to provide students with a means to search for a specific 2-minute segment they may need in order to review for a test.

Solution: Comprehensive Video Content Search

Today modern video platforms are solving the problem of video search.

Panopto’s Smart Search video search engine peers into the actual content of each recording, and indexes every word spoken, every word that appears on-screen, and every word included in presentation slides, speakers notes, viewer comments, and manual metadata. The platform indexes every video in every video library, whether or not it was recorded with Panopto, and timestamps each item so that users can instantly fast-forward to the specific, relevant moments they searched for.

Inside-video search means that every training video a company ever records, as well as any video they record in the future, will be fully searchable — without asking presenters to do anything more than click “record.”

See inside video search in action in the video below:

Employees can search a library of thousands of videos for any keyword they like and then, with a single click, jump to the precise moment in any video in which the speaker has mentioned the phrase. Put simply: comprehensive video content search enables viewers to search video the same way they do the Internet.

Learn More About The Scalable Video Solutions Businesses Are Borrowing From Universities

In our latest white paper, Seven Things Businesses Can Learn From Universities About Video, we describe the seven challenges corporations face when searching for an efficient, effective platform for their video content management needs — and the solutions universities have found to them all:

Challenge #1: The Hardware Issue
Challenge #2: The Perspective Problem
Challenge #3: Video Storage Chaos
Challenge #4: File Incompatibility Frustrations
Challenge #5: Bandwidth Capacity Concerns
Challenge #6: Live Learning Scalability Struggles
Challenge #7: The Video Search Problem

Download your free copy today!

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It’s become fashionable in certain circles to assert that video is changing everything when it comes to education.

Video Isn't Disrupting The Classroom That somehow, pressing record is disrupting the university experience itself.

To this, we say: Nonsense.

Video isn’t disrupting the classroom.

Video is simply a tool for helping students learn. Its use in the classroom is a natural evolution of existing pedagogies — a logical application of an increasingly accessible technology.

Let’s look at a few examples of increasingly technology-enabled classroom practices, that have been around much longer than the technology itself.

Lecture Capture

For centuries, students have feverishly scribbled notes to record the key points of a lecture. In recent decades, many students have individually adopted newer technologies for the task, bringing in tape players, laptops, and digital voice recorders to better capture the materials covered.

Using video for lecture capture simply levels the playing field, ensuring that all students have equal access to the information presented in-class. That access, in turn, enables students to revisit and absorb key points at their own pace. It also enables them to engage more actively in the classroom without fear of missing any essential details.

The Flipped Classroom

Teachers have been assigning readings as homework and dedicating class time to discussing the previous night’s pages since Gutenberg.

Using video merely expands the realm and depth of what can be presented prior to class. Lab demonstrations, step-by-step tutorials, and tours of remote locations are just a few of the new options for the traditional pre-reading assignment.

Watch an example flipped classroom video below:

Student Assignments

There may be no older form of instruction than learning through imitation, a pedagogy we now call role-play exercises or student presentations.

Using video adds value to those activities simply by making it possible to capture and review them. This enables students to watch and learn from their own performances and to review best practices from fellow classmates. It also offers teachers the opportunity to repeat these activities much, much more often.

For teachers, video isn’t changing the classroom — it’s preserving and enhancing it. Where video is in place, instructors are extending their lesson materials, making it possible for students to rewind, replay, and take ownership of their learning experiences.

And for any student who’s ever gotten lost on a complex topic or just missed a day due to illness or travel, video isn’t disrupting anything. It’s capturing what would otherwise be fleeting moments and ensuring they can still be watched, absorbed, and applied.

Experiential Learning

In many academic programs, experiential learning has been a requirement to even earn a degree for decades. Teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, and more all spend extensive time practicing their learnings in the field through student teaching, clinicals, residencies, fellowships and so on before they can graduate.

Video technology now allows educators to bring more of these experiences into the classroom so students are better prepared to tackle real-world challenges in their new professions.

Video-enabled experiential learning such as patient interactions, recorded mock trials, or Geology field demonstrations, to name a few, doesn’t replace those crucial immersive learning experiences in the field, but it does better prepare students for real-world situations. With video-supported course designs, students get more opportunities to practice with their instructors by their sides and to receive valuable feedback before ever stepping foot in the field.

Support Teaching and Learning With Panopto

Panopto’s video platform for education is used by 20 of the top 25 universities in the world to support teaching and learning. If you’d like to see how this one video technology can enhance many different aspects of the student experience on your campus, contact us to request a 30-day free trial today.

The post Video Technology Isn’t Disrupting The Classroom appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Salesforce.com sparked a revolution among today’s always-on, mobile-first sales teams, providing a desktop-level CRM solution that empowered reps with better customer data at their fingertips, no matter where they were in the world.

Of course, quick access to contact info and contract status isn’t the only challenge that sales teams face. Today’s market puts a premium on efficient communication. Teams that can share strategies and trade tips more quickly are better positioned to win more business.

That’s the thinking behind Chatter, Salesforce’s enterprise social network. Integrated alongside Salesforce’s popular CRM software, Chatter has become a place for one-to-many communications for salespeople in the field and at headquarters. Yet while Chatter’s integration with Salesforce provides a convenient tool for communication, it’s lacked the key feature that has brought more engaging experiences to personal social networks for the last three years — video.

As sales teams become increasingly geographically scattered, video communication has become increasingly critical. Today, many sales organizations rely on real-time video conferencing tools, but have yet to tap the even greater opportunity of sharing insights, ideas, and best practices through on-demand video.

That was one of the key concepts we at Panopto had in mind when we developed an integrated video solution for Salesforce. By recording videos from their smartphone or laptop, sales reps can ask questions, share updates, and support one another, no matter where they are in the world. Take a look at just some of what’s possible in this sample recording:

Ask questions and offer support to colleagues

Enterprise social networks like Chatter can simplify the process of getting questions answered. By posting to the Chatter feed, a sales rep in the field is able to ask a question once and get a pool of responses.

Of course, getting colleagues to read and respond to each other’s questions can be difficult. For example, the work of describing a customer interaction often results in a text-based post that goes on for paragraphs.

Video, however, provides a “higher-bandwidth” form of communication. It allows people to describe questions and concepts in greater detail and in less time. For Chatter users, this makes it easier to quickly record a question by speaking, and for subject matter experts, to quickly record and share their answer.

Develop “ambient awareness” of activities across the company

In much the same way, enterprise social networks help entire teams have a better understanding of what is going on with other accounts and in other regions. By posting regular updates to Chatter, sales representatives support their entire organization by highlighting their individual contributions.

Here again, video is a powerful tool for social learning. Learning and development researchers have reported that informal knowledge sharing is twice as effective as formal training at providing employees with information they need to do their jobs. Through the use of video-based knowledge sharing on Chatter, sales reps can get a greater understanding of what’s happening across their organization, learning and applying best practices from colleagues around the world.

Share updates from marketing with the field

Enterprise social networks are also a great way for the sales field to communicate with the marketing team back at headquarters. Many teams already use Chatter’s file storage to build a library of marketing collateral, and marketing managers monitor and respond to questions posted to the Chatter feed. Posting video to Chatter gives marketing a new, powerful tool for updating the entire sales field at once, whether it’s on a new piece of collateral or updated competitive intelligence. Using Chatter’s commenting features allows marketing to get clear feedback from the field on their work and establishes greater transparency across the departments.

Celebrate sales team successes with video “high fives”

When spending the majority of their time on the road or at a home office, sales can be an isolating job. Sales managers and executive teams can use video and Chatter to publicly celebrate top performers in front of an audience of their peers. Similarly, social media coordinators and customer service representatives can share customer praise from social media and support calls, to give everyone on the team a virtual “high five” for their great work.

Of course, reps are frequently the ones with customer insights to share, so good news can travel two ways!

Video brings enterprise social media to life, creating online community across a scattered sales and marketing field

Visionaries in enterprises across every industry are beginning to recognize the value of video beyond video conferencing—for social learning and sales enablement. Learn how Panopto’s new integrations with Salesforce.com and Chatter bring more engaging video communication to everyone in your organization through their smartphones and computers. Contact a member of our team today to sign up for a free trial.

The post Video Brings Your Salesforce Chatter Feed to Life appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

For the vast majority of lecture capture, flipped classroom video lectures, and student presentations, webcam video offers an easy, compelling, and flexible way to share ideas. But every once in a while, it can be fun and refreshing to shake things up by using a new storytelling method, whether you’re delivering a lesson or submitting an assignment.

How to use PowToons with Panopto Enter PowToon, a free, web-based tool for creating animated videos that has made waves in schools and colleges around the country. With straightforward tools for authoring videos with animation, color, graphics, music, and sound, anyone can create simple video presentations that break free of the PowerPoint slide presentation. In a couple of hours, teachers and students can master PowToon to create fun and whimsical presentations that illustrate their ideas through motion.

On behalf of the thousands of classrooms around the world leveraging the power of the Panopto video CMS to store, deliver, and search their videos, as well as collect student video assignments, we wanted to find out if we could bring the fun and whimsy of a PowToon video to the one-stop video management of Panopto.

Here’s our experience:

Using PowToon, we put together a simple animated video for instructors to explain how a flipped classroom would work to their students at the beginning of the semester.

We started from scratch within the PowToon studio editor by creating a few basic slides. Bold text, motion and animations helped bring the presentation to life, making it feel informal and approachable.

When the animation was complete, the Panopto desktop recorder allowed us to record the PowToon preview at up to 60 frames per second, meaning that we didn’t lose any of the PowToon animation in the recording process.

While the video played full screen on the computer, we recorded the webcam video and narration. A few quick video snips and a table of contents later, we had a PowToon video fully integrated into a multi-source video with our webcam footage automatically synced to the animation.

Now what?

While students can view the video on the PowToon website or on public websites like YouTube, we wanted to ensure that students always had easy, logical access to the PowToon video content they were looking for. By centralizing the content in a Panopto video library, we were not only able to create a consistent, singular repository for all classroom videos, but were also able to leverage Panopto’s rich search capabilities.

While this particular video was quite simple in its content, we can imagine using PowToons to create content-rich videos to explain a lesson or make class announcements. One of the greatest benefits of Panopto is its ability to search across a library of video and deeply within the actual content of the video.

Leveraging optical character recognition (OCR) technology, Panopto is able to read all of the copy that appears on-screen. This is as true of the text animated by PowToons as it is with text on a more traditional PowerPoint presentation. Panopto also employs automatic speech recognition (ASR) to comprehend and index words spoken by the presenter. In this case, we chose to record the voiceover with Panopto instead of PowToons, but in either case, adding the video to the Panopto video CMS gives creators the ability to leverage this search indexing.

Tackling Today’s Top 3 Corporate Learning Challenges With Video

1. Aligning learning outcomes to business goals

One of the top challenges identified by L&D professionals was the need to more closely match the goals of training with the goals of the business as a whole.

By interviewing the leadership team, L&D professionals can take the company’s strategic priorities and translate them into tactics for designing the curriculum. Instead of asking executives what employees should be learning, chief learning officers should quiz executives on the problems the business is trying to solve and the opportunities that are ripe for exploitation. When the L&D team understands the who, what, and when, along with the relative priority of the goal, they can better align their training initiatives to business priorities, developing curriculum and criteria for success.

One of the best ways to ensure that the company’s rank and file see the benefit of training initiatives — and take them seriously — is to have leadership voice their support for the program. Often this works best in the form of a short, casual video. By hearing the company’s leaders speak directly to them, employees are better able to “see the big picture” and understand how their performance directly contributes to the bottom line.

As a new training initiative progresses over weeks and months, the L&D team can highlight their colleagues’ performance as a whole in the form of a video. Publically reflecting on the progress of the organization as a whole is a great way to rejuvenate interest in the initiative, praise top performers, and report on the impact to business outcomes that initiative is intended to support.

2. Maximizing learning event effectiveness with training reinforcement

When so much effort and so many resources go into developing training material, trainers are finding it increasingly important to be able to ensure that their training events are as effective as possible.

Based on what researchers know about memory, and based in part on Will Thalheimer’s 2006 work, humans forget approximately 90% of what they learn within one month — unless they repeat it. Through a process known as interval reinforcement, learners who engage with content through small, spaced-out moments that remind them of what they have learned, retention can be increased between 78 and 94%.

This is great news for corporate trainers, but one that means that these moments of reinforcing content must be made available digitally, accessible on employee’s desks and smartphones.

Video is one of the best ways to produce training reinforcement content. Learners are already comfortable with using the web to view short-form video for information and entertainment. For trainers, videos are easier to create than ever before using nothing more than their desktop or laptop computer, a slide deck, a webcam, and desktop recording software. Gone are the days where creating video required a team of AV experts and substantial spend on their professional services.

If your training the event was live, capturing the presentation on video is another great way to generate content for training reinforcement. By editing the event into recaps of 2-5 minutes each, L&D professionals can simply repurpose the content in a way that is easily digestible and accessible on-demand.

Sometimes, forgoing a live training event altogether is the most efficient way to support training reinforcement. Instead of a single, keystone event — with all of the cost and coordination included — break up the lesson into short microlessons and distribute it over weeks or months. Skipping the long-form training event while stretching a concept out over several weeks will leave learners more refreshed and ready to engage with the training.

3. Empowering employees to teach and learn from one another

Social learning remains one of the most popular topics on the minds of learning and development professionals as the industry collectively attempts to find the best ways to tap this largely informal mode of knowledge transfer. From semi-informal events like employee brown bags and knowledge-transfer meetings to highly-informal solicitation of advice and sharing best practices, desktop video recording software and a so-called “enterprise YouTube” make social learning at scale possible.

Easy Video Creation & Secure Sharing With Panopto

Video makes creating training content easy for anyone, with the right tools. From recording and editing, to storing videos in a secure environment and sharing them with just the right people on any device, traditional learning management systems do little to support this increasingly popular medium. For Panopto customers, our end-to-end enterprise video platform makes it easy for anyone in the department and throughout the company the ability to author training content with ease.

To learn more about how Panopto can help your learning and development organization accomplish this year’s biggest goals, contact a member of our team today to request a free trial.

The post How Video Helps Solve Today’s Top L&D Challenges appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Your team’s go-to guru — the subject matter expert with a dozen years’ experience on your systems and a library’s worth of institutional knowledge between their ears — has a favor to ask:

“Stop using me as your de facto trainer and let me actually get some work done.”

Sure they’re happy to help you out. But year after year of being tapped for every new hire onboarding, every SME inquiry, every tap on the shoulder with “just a quick question on how this works” —it’s eating up valuable time.

Sharing knowledge by tapping experts on the fly creates two problems for your organization:

It’ll never scale. Your internal experts only have so much time – as your team grows and as more people learn to come to them for questions, they’ll be forced to choose between being a good teammate or being productive. Either way, your team’s output will suffer.
It isn’t permanent. That expertise walks out the door each night and, one day, it won’t come back. If the answers to those simple onboarding questions and repeat issue workarounds aren’t captured somewhere, you’ll be lost the day your expert isn’t there to provide a quick answer.

There is an easy way to scale social learning.

First, document. Not an actual document — no one reads those — but a video recording of your internal expert sharing their knowledge. Screen shares, recorded presentations, on-location video shot with a smartphone or a laptop webcam — whatever works, so long as you can record their insight.

Then, share. Add that video to a communal library where every team member can find it and review it whenever the question comes up. As a best practice, use a video library that enables employees to search inside the video, making it easy to find granular details in seconds.

The result will be your own reference desk, a searchable social learning library that’s always at hand, 24/7/365, ready to help your team find answers to common questions even faster than if they just walked over to the team guru and asked.

How To Build A Social Learning Progam With Video

Video-based social learning is the easy way to preserve and scale your institutional knowledge. In our latest white paper, we’ve created a guide for learning and development teams, training, HR professionals, and other people managers who are interested in fueling social learning with video.

Included are 6 ideas for getting started, 3 ways to build a culture that embraces social learning, and 5 ways an enterprise video platform can help. Follow the link below to download it for free.

Download: How to Build a Social Learning Program with Video

And if you’re ready to get started, Panopto makes it easy to set up a video platform to record, store, search, and share video, with no new hardware and no special training required. Contact us to request a free 30-day trial.

The post How to Scale Social Learning appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

A pair of high-profile articles published in recent years has had educators buzzing about technology’s place in the classroom.

New York Magazine leads the charge, in The Case Against Laptops in the Classroom. The story shares the experiences of three prominent university professors, each of whom have banned laptops and other electronic devices in their lectures. Though only anecdotal, each instructor notes that after students’ initial resistance faded, class sessions became more interactive. Without a digital device in hand, the subconscious pull “just to check in” on social networks, email, or any number of other distracting sites is eliminated, and students can truly be present for class.

With a different take on the subject, a recent Quartz article looks into the efficacy of individualized instruction versus standardized content. Though the author takes pains to clarify that technology is an invaluable teaching aid when used properly, the story (titled We Cannot Rely on the Internet to Teach Our Children) focuses on research that finds that students who receive individualized instruction typically perform two standard deviations — fully 98% on average — better than those who don’t. Technology can present information, it seems, but only a real-life teacher can impart knowledge.

These articles may appear at first to be anti-technology, but that’s not quite true. What they are is pro-teacher.

Technology has earned a place in the learning experience, with established value as a reference resource and training ground. But no technology can replace the value of a great teacher — one who helps students find connections, challenges them to apply concepts, and pushes them to dig deeper and reach further in pursuit of true understanding.

Today, in-class time represents only a fraction of the total hours a student will spend on a class’s activities, readings, and assignments. As such, many teachers have concluded that for those few invaluable minutes when students are all together, even momentary Facebook-enabled distractions are simply too great a loss. Banning technology in the classroom is a step towards making the most out of interactive learning time, pulling every student into discussions and activities, and creating the opportunity for instructors to help each student individually.

Of course, while student technologies may distract, a number of teachers are finding there is one worthwhile exception to all-out digital bans. Video has become the one technology in the classroom that can help keep other technology out of the classroom. We’re biased, of course, so we’ll let Stonehill College’s Bronwyn Bleakley share her experience instead:

The Leading Video Platform For Education

At Panopto, we’re proud to build the leading video platform for education that enables schools and universities to record lectures, flip classrooms, record student assignments — and help instructors make their classrooms more interactive, more open, and more effective. Interested in learning more about Panopto’s video technology can help your institution create distraction-free classrooms? Contact our team to schedule a free trial today.

The post BAN TECHNOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM (…except one) appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

For more than a decade, a wave of new eLearning tools have helped free learning and development professionals from repetitive classroom trainings. Instead of standing in front of a conference room of employees each quarter, trainers can now deploy curriculum in the form of online video presentations and check for comprehension with interactive quizzes and games.

Not only has eLearning made the work of L&D professionals more scalable, it has also made the content they produce better. By making lessons available on-demand, they have ensured that employees can review whatever content they need, when they need it. From software training to regulatory compliance, eLearning has transformed the way companies train.

But as learning and development professionals know, designing courses that will span the entire organization is just one piece of the training puzzle. While a great deal of the emphasis for training professionals tends to be on onboarding new employees and communicating company policies, procedures, and culture, there is also a need to produce a wealth of training curricula for individual departments and physical locations.

Departmental training at scale is the next big challenge in employee development.

When departmental job functions are scalable, spending L&D resources on training materials makes sense. Customer service representatives, HR coordinators, and inside sales representatives — any job function that needs to be executed consistently by dozens or hundreds of individuals — are all great candidates for specifically targeted onboarding and training content.

That opportunity, however, creates significant pressure for training teams. From interviewing subject matter experts to identifying the right andragogy for the content and audience, it can be a real challenge to develop curricula tailored for individual departments and job functions.

Worse, even where training materials exist, what happens when someone on the team finds a better way to do their job? A small, iterative improvement might mean hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars saved when multiplied across an entire workforce. How does your organization ensure that those tidbits of knowledge can be captured and shared for the benefit of all, without waiting until the next round of curriculum redesign?

The Solution: Empowering Training Within Departments

Today, eLearning tools are increasingly available outside the walls of the L&D department. This is great news for corporate trainers. By extending the tools of the trade to subject matter experts within a department, L&D professionals can deputize their colleagues, employing the benefits of on-demand training materials in an expanding number of applications.

Onboarding New Hires

Beyond the blanket onboarding process common to every employee, functional teams have a host of new information to share with new hires. From communicating the roles of other individuals on the team to navigating a labyrinth of corporate resources, every department will need to explain the tools, techniques, and team members that will be critical to their new hires’ success. Content like this doesn’t usually need to be designed in through a sophisticated and rigorous curriculum design process, it just needs to be clear and accessible, and to be able to adapt as team processes, tools, and people evolve.

Capturing the Knowledge of Outgoing Team Members

For smaller teams, where one individual’s deep institutional knowledge is key to the whole team’s success, turnover can be a nightmare to productivity. When someone leaves, they take their knowledge with them. It is only in the weeks and months after their colleague’s departure that teams take notice as they struggle to do without the knowledge they once had. Taking steps to document the knowledge of outgoing employees can help maintain the team’s workflow, creating a knowledge base that existing and future employees can rely on to guide their continued work.

On-Demand Skills Training

In almost all professions, there are specific skills and tools that employees will need to master in order to perform their jobs successfully. From specialized software — think CRMs in sales or EHRs in medicine — to homegrown mechanical skills and even effective customer interactions, companies rely on their employees’ ability to master the tools of their trade. While some of these tools and processes will be so common that on-demand learning materials and training workshops will be offered by their vendors or private training companies, others will be hyper-specific to an individual company or department. Giving employees inside those departments the ability to record a screen share presentation of a piece of software, or model great in-store customer engagement, allows individuals to share their mastery with their colleagues for the benefit of the entire team.

Sharing Best Practices and Process Feedback

In business, no process, technology, or team structure is permanent. Development professionals want their colleagues to keep learning, and so do the companies that employ them. Whether it comes from an article in a trade publication, a tip from a friend, a presentation at a workshop, or even an epiphany by the employee themselves, learning can come from anywhere. Once a better way to do things resides within one person, shouldn’t everyone else on the team know it too? The sharing of best practices and the solicitation of advice from colleagues is a process that has existed as long as humans have been able to communicate with one another. Known as social or informal learning, this process ensures that teams will keep moving forward together.

Watch one of our engineers share his knowledge of SQL Server database deadlocks in the video below:

Making Video Authoring Accessible Throughout Your Organization

Today, L&D departments can do quite a bit to deputize their colleagues all across their organizations to better train within their teams.

Leading L&D teams have already mastered video as a curriculum authoring tool, leveraging the technology as an effective and intuitive way to replicate interpersonal learning activities across time and space. And whereas years ago this entailed a substantial investment in specialized AV staff and technology, today that requirement no longer holds.

Modern enterprise video platforms have made it easy to extend eLearning authoring tools to every desktop in the organization if a company so chooses. Today video platforms like Panopto run easily on any PC or Mac and enable anyone anywhere to record virtually anything with the webcam, camcorder, mobile device, or specialty tools of their choice. Videos are automatically uploaded and formatted, indexed for search, and centralized for convenient sharing (whether through email or an enterprise social network like Jive or Salesforce Chatter). Without the need for dedicated specialists or processes, these tools can make recording and sharing a training video even faster than typing up an email — and make the content itself exponentially more engaging.

You Can’t Expect Innovation to Just Happen — You Have to Foster It

While every business aspires to innovate, the pressures of quarterly earnings and near-term goals often leave individual employees with no time to look back at the big picture. Worse, even when some new moment of inspiration is had, few if any organizations have a means for employees to press for change. The best they can do is send an email up the chain of command and hope.

That’s left a history littered with companies like the once-venerable Kodak — organizations that followed their own P&L statements right out of existence, as they diligently managed expenses but failed to recognize their market shifting.

Today’s organizations can’t afford to wait and hope good ideas bubble up — they need to make fostering new ideas a priority. And that starts with solving a key challenge: how to connect inspired team members with those who can actually implement those ideas, in a way that’s open and efficient for both.

TED[you]: How You Can Cultivate In-House Innovators

While the need organizations face to actively support long-term innovation is a great one, a powerful solution may in fact be small. TED has cast the form for how big thinkers and ideas seekers can come together. Instituting your own TED-like program can be an easy way to apply a familiar process to supporting the next great big ideas in your organization.

Creating an internal TED-style event series can help daylight niches and markets, opportunities and threats, new tech and creative solutions. It can give your people a place to pitch ideas for new initiatives and give your execs an easy place to turn to for innovation.

Regular TED-style events provide innovators with a clear process
Hosting regular, scheduled events gives everyone time to plan for the work involved. Rather than dashing off half-formed ideas whenever they come up (or sitting on fully formed concepts until the opportunity is missed), innovators are given a target for cultivating their ideas and getting them ready to share.

Regular events mean no ideas get lost in the shuffle
Many organizations expect new ideas to “trickle upward” through the traditional chain of command. This, however, means innovation is permanently a one-off activity. Leaders have little choice but to experience employees’ moments of innovation as a sort of chaos — an unexpected email that demands they put down what they’re doing and consider some unexplored facet of the big picture. And if any one link the chain doesn’t have the time or can’t make the connection, the idea hits a dead-end.

Video ensures every idea is seen — and can be saved and shared later as well
While it’s the ideas shared that are the focus of conversation, it’s the video format that has helped catapult the TED conference into national prominence. Shared online, recordings of TED events are easy to circulate and share, helping to ensure the right inspiration meets the right support. And as the event specializes in presenting big, world-changing ideas, video makes it possible to hang on to what would otherwise be a fleeting moment presented live, to store it where it can be re-watched and acted on when the time is right.

Regular events remind team members that your business cares about innovation
In an era where everyone’s focused on the bottom line, it’s not uncommon to hear grousing about “myopic” organizations that “can’t see past the end of the quarter.” Hosting regular TED-style events can help companies make clear their commitment to progress — and that inside their walls, ideas are welcome from everyone. It’s a message even those who don’t participate will recognize and value.

Best of all, while the TED events themselves have become recognizable for their superlative production value, holding a similar event within your own walls can often require little more than booking a meeting space and sending a few emails announcing the initiative.

To see just what’s possible — and just how easy it can be — check out the GRADx event, a TED-style showcase held by Duke University this past semester showcasing some of the big ideas of the university’s graduating class.

Duke GRADx Event - Panopto Video Platform

Once you’ve set a date for your in-house TED event and started scheduling presentations, be sure to plan for recording and sharing everything. A modern enterprise video platform — the same tool many organizations already rely on for enterprise video platform — the same tool many organizations already rely on for scaling training and delivering corporate communications — will make this easy as well. With a video platform like Panopto you can record from anywhere with just a laptop and webcam. And once your event’s complete, your video platform will automatically upload everything, transcode it for optimal playback on-demand on any device, and even index every word spoken or shown on-screen for quick search and discovery when the time is right.

Panopto makes it easy for anyone, anywhere to record presentations and share them online, both as live streaming webcasts and recorded on-demand video. To see how Panopto can help your organization share and discover ideas, contact our team for a free trial today.

The post TED[you]: Should Your Business Have an Internal Thought Leadership Program? appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

We live in an age of immediacy. With so much information available to us on the internet, and so many ways to communicate with our coworkers, we expect our questions to be answered promptly and our work to advance swiftly all day long.

When knowledge isn’t preserved within an organization, however, those expectations aren’t always met. People travel and take vacation. We have our own jobs and responsibilities and can’t be available 24/7 to answer other people’s questions. If our unique knowledge never exists outside our own heads, then sometimes our coworkers will simply have to do without it. That puts a big damper on productivity — which, hour by hour, has a significant impact on the company’s bottom line.

In our first-of-its-kind Workplace Knowledge And Productivity study, we surveyed 1001 American employees across a variety of industries to learn as much as we could about their experiences using — and having to cope without — unique knowledge. Three-fourths of these respondents have been working for at least 15 years, though not necessarily at the same job. A third of them work specifically in a learning and development capacity, which allowed us to get even deeper into how knowledge is and isn’t managed by organizations.

What we found is that employees are much less productive than they could be when knowledge isn’t shared efficiently.

How Inefficient Knowledge Sharing Hurts Productivity

1. Waiting On Coworkers For Knowledge

Employees in our survey spend an average of 5 hours every week waiting to get in touch with people that have the unique knowledge they need. For 1 in 10 workers, it’s not unusual to wait twice that long. During that time, work is delayed, suspended or even canceled altogether.

Panopto Productivity Report: Workers spend 5 hours per week waiting on others for knowledge

For example, say you want advice on how to structure a presentation for a client. You’ve seen multiple examples, and each one is structured differently. You send an email to your coworker Mandy, who knows the client better than anyone and can tell you the best way to approach your presentation. But Mandy is in meetings all day and doesn’t write back. You send a follow-up email the next morning, and later in the afternoon, she’s finally able to get back to you with the advice you need.

While waiting for Mandy’s response, you shifted your focus to other things. But your presentation was stuck at square one. You lost a day or two of potential progress, and now you have to cram to get it all done by the deadline.

2. Searching For Knowledge Inefficiently

Rather than lose time while they wait to hear back from someone, employees may try to forge ahead on their own. But doing so is often very inefficient: roaming online for information, second-guessing their decisions and essentially grasping at straws.

It’s almost like they’re new employees again. Their own experience can’t see them through in this situation. And the person with the right experience isn’t around to fill the gap. In our survey, employees reported spending 8 hours — a full day’s work — in this mode every week.

Panopto Productivity Report: Employees Spend 8 hours a week looking for knowledge

It’s true that trial and error can be educational. You often come out the other end with new knowledge that helps you out next time the situation arises. But the fact remains there are more efficient ways to acquire the same knowledge. It takes a lot less than 8 hours to watch a tutorial video or access another form of knowledge that the company has invested in preserving.

3. Duplicating Efforts

A third source of inefficiency comes when an employee knowingly or unknowingly does work that someone else has already done or is currently doing. On average, employees reported spending nearly 6 hours each week “reinventing the wheel” and duplicating other people’s work. Almost 1 in 3 say they spend more than 6 redundant hours every week. For 14 percent, duplicative work takes up a minimum of 10 hours.

Duplication can happen for a few reasons. Maybe the coworker who has already done the work isn’t immediately available to provide an answer or point you to the right resources. Or maybe you’re simply unaware that your effort is duplicative, and you unwittingly invest time and energy into coming up with a solution that someone else has already gone to the trouble to find.

Panopto Workplace Productivity Report: Employees waste 6 hours a week duplicating efforts

What are the most common reasons for duplicating existing work?

About a third of employees we surveyed reinvent the work of others knowingly and intentionally, so they can try or learn something new.

But for more than 70 percent of employees, duplication occurs because either people can’t reach the other person doing the same work, or because they have no idea someone else is doing it in the first place.

In part, this is an issue of time. Twenty percent of workers reported duplicating the work of others only because they’d been unable to reach the colleague in question. If that colleague’s insights had been more conveniently available, there would have been no reason to seek out the information independently.

Most often, however, the reason employees duplicate existing work is a simple lack of awareness that the work is already underway or complete. Time is a factor here as well — when project deadlines loom, employees will seldom spend much time investigating whether potential solutions already exist. The challenge to organizations, then, is to ensure that when relevant knowledge is available, other workers can find it quickly before they try to solve a problem themselves.

Panopto Workplace Productivity Report: Why we duplicate efforts at work

Employees Value Knowledge Preservation

Up to this point, our picture of unique knowledge and efficiency in the workplace has been built largely on time and proportions, such as how much time workers spend on certain tasks and how different sources and types of knowledge compare with one another.

But we also asked respondents about their views and attitudes on unique knowledge. How do employees feel about knowledge loss and knowledge sharing?

Panopto Workplace Productivity Report: Employees value knowledge preservation

Overall, employees agreed with a number of statements that support the notion that knowledge gained through experience is exceptionally valuable, and that turnover negatively impacts the company’s knowledge resources — costing the company both time and money.

We also uncovered strong sentiments about the way that organizations manage knowledge. 63 percent of employees report that they would prefer to work for organizations in which unique knowledge is preserved. A similar proportion feels that organizations that fail to support a culture of knowledge sharing are making a mistake.

For employers, the big question stemming from our assessment of employee attitudes is “What do we do about it?”

The answer, according to our survey: find ways to capture and share what your people know.

If there’s one takeaway for employers, it’s that the people who work for them want more and better means of preserving unique knowledge so that it might still be accessible even after employees leave the company.

Of the 1001 employees in our survey, only 3 percent think preserving knowledge isn’t important. At 85 percent, a huge majority thinks it is.

Panopto Workplace Productivity Report: Employees favor knowledge preservation

It comes as no surprise that employees who have had to wait or struggle to get the information they need are the most likely to be in favor of knowledge sharing. Perhaps more unexpectedly, however, employees who haven’t been personally inconvenienced aren’t far behind: 80 percent of employees who find information easy to access inside their organizations still feel strongly about the importance of knowledge sharing. The same is true for 77 percent of employees who haven’t personally faced delays.

Panopto Workplace Productivity Report: Getting information is hard

What this means is that employees see knowledge sharing as more than a way to resolve common pain points. They see it as a good idea in general. And if they ever have been personally inconvenienced, they’re even more convinced.

Employers, therefore, shouldn’t wait for their workforce to be frustrated before they look into better ways of sharing knowledge. Odds are their employees are ready for it right now.

How Much Is Unshared Knowledge Costing You?

Unshared knowledge holds employees back in their day-to-day work, making them less productive than they could be, little by little. They wait for information. They struggle to make progress without it. And they duplicate the efforts of other employees. All of these inefficiencies across your entire workforce add up to big losses for your company.

To date, the frustrations caused by poor knowledge sharing have gone overlooked largely because they’ve been difficult to quantify. Now, with real data showing the amount of time the average employee loses looking and waiting for knowledge, we can assign a real cost to unshared knowledge.

Try our calculator to see how much your company is losing >

The post How Much Time Is Lost To Knowledge Sharing Inefficiencies At Work? appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

More than 50 years ago, Peter Drucker predicted information would change the way people work — instead of generating value through physical labor with their muscles, they instead do it with their minds.

Drucker described this worker of the future as a “knowledge worker.”

What is a knowledge worker?

At its most simple definition, a knowledge worker is someone whose job requires them to think for a living.

Drucker described the knowledge worker’s labor as “ever-changing, dynamic, and autonomous.” Knowledge work is all about problem-solving and requires both convergent and divergent thinking to answer all the simple and complex questions that arise in daily work.

Knowledge workers would be expected to innovate often, routinely coming up with new and better ways of doing things. And in their increasingly specialized roles, these employees would be expected to know more about their daily work than their managers — meaning autonomy is a necessity, not simply a nice-to-have.

Are all employees knowledge workers?

While some may disagree, we argue yes. All of your employees can and should be considered knowledge workers. After all, everyone is an expert in something.

Even highly routine jobs require improvisation and the use of judgment in ambiguous situations — the workers in these roles are often just as capable of creative problem solving and adding value to the business. In fact, discounting their unique knowledge may cause you to overlook someone’s one-of-a-kind institutional know-how, and thereby cause the quality of your products and services to suffer or stagnate.

The Harvard Business Review (HBR) published an article nearly a decade ago asking this exact question — are all employees knowledge workers? Its authors came to the same conclusion, making the case against drawing artificial boundaries in your workforce and cautioning business leaders not to be quick to write-off some jobs as mindless and routine.

To illustrate why, HBR looked back to when Japanese auto manufacturers began treating all of their workers as knowledge workers in the 1980s. These companies began encouraging every employee — from managers to assembly workers on the factory floor — to help support the company in solving problems and continuously improving productivity. This move unleashed a passion in the factory workers assembling cars, giving new meaning to jobs often perceived as mindless and repetitive. It also significantly improved the quality of the final product, helping to win significant market share away from established carmakers that still relied on the old management model of command and control.

The Rise Of The Knowledge Worker In The Age Of Automation

Just a few years ago, researchers at Oxford University warned that technology would destroy nearly 47 percent of U.S. jobs in coming years. But so far, quite the opposite trend has been appearing — there are today more jobs in the U.S. than there are workers. Even as machines are made ever smarter, today’s jobs increasingly require social, emotional, creative, or relational skills — and these are not easily replaced by machines or automation.

Over the past three decades, almost all job growth has come from the two categories of work that are non-routine: knowledge work and work in service occupations. In fact, the growth in knowledge and service jobs is outpacing the number of jobs that are disappearing due to automation. And while some jobs may indeed be gone, they have been replaced by others that require employees to connect with other people, think on their feet, find information, and use their unique knowledge to problem-solve.

Knowledge Workers Are Becoming Learning Workers

Drucker once observed that societal transformation can happen in a matter of decades — basic values, social and political structures, arts, and key institutions can all change in one generation. Now fifty years after Drucker initially constructed the idea of a knowledge worker, the system is changing again.

Today, we can instantly learn anything, anywhere. And the knowledge worker of the past is becoming the learning worker of today. Forbes recently noted, “how we value workers is changing, and the emphasis now is on an employee’s ability to learn and adapt, rather than their readiness to come into a job with the skills required to do everything.”

For businesses, this means establishing support (both culturally and tactically) for learning throughout the entire organization is even more critical than it’s been in the past. From onboarding to employee training to social learning, businesses must work to create and curate training ecosystems that enable continuous learning and rapid knowledge sharing among all employees.

Learn How Video Can Enable Continuous Learning In Your Organization

While becoming a true learning organization has in the past required extensive dedication, time, energy, and resources, advancements in learning technology now present senior leaders with new tools designed to help make that nearly insurmountable task much more achievable.

When it comes to building a highly adaptable culture of learning within your organization, fully half the battle is simply finding a means to scale the way you share knowledge. If this is an area your organization has struggled with, consider the how an enterprise video platform can help you build a sustainable learning organization.

Here’s How L&D Can Be the Hero…

On average, today it takes 51 days and a cost of $10,731 to fill an open position. Much of that is simply spent “weeding out inexperienced candidates.”

But three years’ experience does not an expert make. In fact, we’d venture that most firms requiring 3 years of prior work do so not out of need for any specific expertise, but instead just to speed up onboarding and eliminate the need to train for some of the more basic workplace expectations.

Those are reasonable goals, and if your organization is quickly and affordably hiring people with 3+ years under their belt, you have no reason to change what you’re doing.

But if you’re seeing roles going unfilled — or if you’re overhearing stories of bidding wars for entry-level talent — it might just be time to partner up with your recruiting team to make this market inefficiency work for you.

Solution: Provide the Benefits of 3 Years’ Experience During Onboarding

If it’s your company’s goal to hire people with a certain level of expertise, then you have two options: pay more to hire for experience, or find a faster way to give new hires the benefit of that experience.

Option 1 is up to the budget of the hiring manager.

Option 2 is something L&D teams can do something about.

If you as an employee learning and development team can partner with recruiting and identify the institutional knowledge you’d expect someone with 3 years’ experience to have, you can create an “entry-level employee bootcamp” that covers all that information as part of your onboarding program. You can then structure that bootcamp to be available as an on-demand course for newbies to work through over their first 6-12 months.

Presto! Now your new hires are able to act more like 3-year veterans, PLUS your company can have its choice of all the best talent in an untapped pool.

For many organizations, designing a new entry-level employee bootcamp will be an ideal application of L&D resources. Companies tend to have a large number of reasonably similar starter positions, and those roles often turn over more frequently than do more senior posts. That means you get to take advantage of scale — creating this kind of training as an on-demand offering enables your L&D team to deliver the content far more often, for more people, and in more places than would be practical live in person.

Better still, because it’s a set program delivered on-demand, your L&D team can present all this material consistently for every new hire, and do so at the exact right time in each new hire’s tenure.

So What Could You Include in an On-Demand Entry-Level Employee Bootcamp?

As with any training initiative, the right learning materials depend on the audience, their responsibilities, and the expectations your company has for them.

That said, what most truly entry-level new hires benefit most from — and what most companies requiring 3 years’ experience are hoping to avoid teaching — is simply the information that will help a first-time employee find their footing, both in their specific role and in the modern workplace in general. And that will come in three flavors:

Formal Training:

How-To’s for Corporate Systems

Most workplaces rely on a sea of tools for productivity, communications, measurement, and more. Whether it’s Salesforce or Slack, GitHub or Google Drive, legacy architecture or leading-edge infrastructure, there may be dozens of systems and tools your IT ecosystem. In many cases, these tools will be used by multiple teams or even the entire organization, so it’s a good idea to help your new hires understand the right way to use them.

Work with your hiring managers to understand which tools your entry-level new hires need to be familiar with, and create or curate a series that will help new users get up to speed.

In this sample training program, a subject matter expert walks through the details of how to best use Tableau’s business analytics software for specific business applications:

Office Etiquette 101

Organizational culture doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built in the interactions we have every day with every other member of our organization. The specifics of your culture should of course be unique to you, but no matter where your workplace falls on the cultural continuum, it’s a good idea to give your first-timers a few tips on how you expect them to conduct themselves.

There’s no need to overdo this part. Spotlight a few of the worst behaviors related to dress, language, timeliness, and personal activity during work time you’ve seen in order to provide a benchmark for “what’s unacceptable” and most people will figure out the finer points from there. Entry-level hires may be new to the workplace, but they’re not new to the world.

How You Help Us Succeed

One of the most common complaints heard from entry-level employees is the feeling that their job simply doesn’t matter. This despair can be powerfully demotivating, and can lead to turnover. Your entry-level employee bootcamp should go out of its way to combat this notion.

While most jobs for first-timers may not feature much in the way of authority, the fact that a position is on your payroll at all suggests the company sees some value in it. You need to help that new hire see that value clearly too.

Fortunately, this is the type of training senior executives excel at delivering. Work with your leadership to provide an overview of how your company makes money, and go out of your way to connect the dots for entry-level employees so they can see how their work really does allow the whole company to succeed. Bonus points if you can get your CEO to present — a message is never heard as well as when it comes from the top.

Job Skills Training

Role-Specific Functional Training Courses Developed by Central HQ

Consistency is key in any training activity, and is especially important when it comes to helping first-time employees get up to speed. While the specifics of the content will depend on the position, your central HQ should identify the skills and philosophies you’d like everyone in your targeted position(s) to have, no matter where they are in the world.

Especially for businesses where entry-level employees are also often the first point of interaction with customers, vendors, or other external stakeholders, ensuring every single new hire has received the same core training will help your team deliver consistent experiences that build trust in your brand.

Role-Specific Functional Training Courses Developed by Team/Division Management

Of course, while consistency is key, you don’t want to overlook the insights of your teams. Whether these come from local or regional management, distinct business units within the company, or just a few high performers on your leadership development track, bringing in experts from around the company can help to add color to your central HQ courses, as well as give individual managers the chance to hone their team culture within your larger organizational culture.

In this sample training program, a team lead walks through expectations for store merchandising according to brand standards:

Sidenote: Watch Who’s Watching!

Few training tools still exist that can’t track how people are using them. Make time to regularly review the reports available in your LMS, video CMS, and any other training systems you use.

Analytics will tell you which employees are really spending time with your materials, and knowing that will help you identify the top performers or coach those who might be struggling.

Informal Training

Subject Matter Expert (SME) Knowledge Sharing

Social learning may have all the buzz these days, but the fact is it’s one of the oldest methods of training out there. People have been trading know-how over the water cooler since well before the water cooler was invented.

The challenge to effective social learning for entry-level employees is two-fold. First, SMEs are often quite busy and don’t have the time to regularly share their institutional knowledge. And second, even when an SME can make time for a brown-bag discussion of best practices, their knowledge is often so deep that entry-level employees can easily get lost in the details.

So what’s the solution? Record it. Asking your SMEs to document what they know — either as a written guide or a quick video walkthrough — can both make their institutional knowledge available whenever it’s needed, and make it infinitely replayable for those first-timers who just need to hear it explained one more time.

Curated Institutional Knowledge

For any position in your company, there will likely be a number of skills and insights that aren’t essential to the role per se, but are nonetheless still useful for anyone hoping to make a career with you.

This content truly could include everything and the kitchen sink, so be judicious. Tips from other recent entry-level new hires on what they wish they’d known, instructions for how to deal with common issues around the office (think “refilling the ink in the printer”), a guide to what all the acronyms senior staff use actually mean — anything that, if you were to think back to your own first job, you’d have wanted to know.

In this sample knowledge sharing program, a member of the IT team helps new people identify potential phishing and other email scam attempts:

Getting Started

Your goal for an on-demand entry-level employee bootcamp isn’t to produce your next CEO. It’s to build a targeted onboarding experience that can give your newest employees all the benefits of 3 years’ experience without the actual time served.

And your bootcamp need not be perfect right from the beginning. In fact, it almost certainly won’t be — once you introduce the program, you’ll likely receive all kinds of input on how to make the process even more useful. So remember this, and start by creating and curating only the absolute most important learning materials you will want to share.

Like all employee training, how exactly it should be delivered is up to your organizational culture. There are many ways to deliver effective training on-demand.

In recent years, video, in particular, has shown significant promise in this space — both because recorded presentations are often easier for trainers and others to produce than formal written documents, and because video content is often easier for learners of all skill levels to follow along.

Beginner's Guide To Video Training- Panopto

Scaling Employee Onboarding and Training With Video

Want to know more about how other organizations use video to support and scale employee training? We wrote the book on it.

Click here to download your own copy of 14 Ways to Use Video for Formal and Informal Learning.

The post 61 Percent Of Entry Level Jobs Require 3 Years’ Experience appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

A version of this article originally appeared in Chief Learning Officer.

We live in a world where movie-grade cameras fit in pockets and USB thumb drives can hold a lifetime of content. The commoditization of professional video equipment and storage has enabled L&D teams to create exponentially more video content and scale their training programs at a fraction of the cost it would’ve taken just a few years ago.

While capturing video can help your team conduct trainings more efficiently, how can you ensure that their training videos provide the greatest value for the rest of your workforce?

The video content management system provides an answer. In recent years, video CMSs have begun to incorporate machine learning technology, enabling the software to learn by identifying patterns in large data sets. Specifically, machine learning is enabling organizations to unlock the value of video by helping employees find the information they need to perform at their best.

Search: The Last Great Video Challenge

In traditional learning management systems and other content repositories, video search is typically limited to manually entered metadata like titles, tags, and descriptions.

For your employees, this presents two problems. First, it limits the chances that their searches will actually find the right video. Second, it prevents employees from searching within videos to find that relevant two-minute segment they need to accomplish a task.

Consider a 45-minute-long recorded instructor-led training session. On average, a trainer speaks 125 words per minute, so during the session, let’s assume more than 5,000 words will be spoken. Of those, let’s conservatively estimate that only 10 percent will be of unique value to an employee searching for information.

That’s 500 words. Manually tagging them all would take hours. Not tagging them would limit the discoverability of the video. Neither outcome is desirable.

Even if the trainer painstakingly added 500 tags to the video, those tags would still only help employees find the starting point of the recording. In most cases, your people don’t want to watch training videos in their entirety. Instead, they’re looking for precise moments in the video that contain insights on a particular topic. With traditional video search, the only solution is to click randomly through the timeline or take the time to watch the full recording.

These inefficiencies in search reduce the value of your e-learning initiatives because they prevent employees from using video as a just-in-time learning resource.

Inside Video Search: Making Your Video Content Discoverable

Fortunately, video search has made tremendous advances in the past few years, and these advances have become standard in many video CMSs. Modern video search engines enable employees to find any word spoken or shown on-screen within any video and then instantly fast-forward to that precise moment.

Under the hood, these video search engines are powered by machine learning. Specifically, two technologies analyze video content to create a search index: automatic speech recognition works to recognize words spoken by your instructors, and optical character recognition discerns the words presented onscreen. These technologies are trained with massive data sets and deep-learning algorithms to identify individual words and phrases, which are then time-stamped and added to the search index.

The result? By converting speech and on-screen content into a timeline of text, these search engines make video content as discoverable as documents or email.

When your employees search your video library, they not only find the most relevant recordings, but also the precise moments within those videos where the relevant topic was mentioned by the instructor or shown on their screen.

Measurable Returns on Employee Productivity

By making your training videos searchable, you unlock all the valuable information they contain and make it available to your employees at their moments of need. This can dramatically improve workforce productivity by reducing the time employees spend searching for information required to do their jobs.

At companies such as Synaptics, the results have been measurable. The organization estimates that employees save 15 minutes a week through the use of video search. That modest individual gain translates into thousands of hours of productivity gains across the business each year.

As your organization continues to create e-learning videos, remember that the content is of little value if it isn’t discoverable. Machine learning technology provides a novel way to realize the latent value of these recordings. Learning leaders who capitalize on this opportunity stand to improve workforce productivity, drive business results and ultimately improve the bottom line.

Ready To Improve Productivity And Enhance Learning?

Try the video content management system that Forrester commended for having the best support for video search. Contact our team today to request a free 30-day trial.

The post Improve Workplace Productivity With Searchable Training Videos appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Video is a unique beast. It’s more engaging than a training manual and it helps scale training across large organizations. But it’s exceptionally difficult to manage and share video-based training resources without the right set of tools. And the systems that organizations typically rely upon to support learning and knowledge sharing at work, such as learning management systems (LMSs), content management systems (CMSs), and corporate file sharing systems, were simply never built to support video-based learning.

At Panopto, we’ve had the opportunity to work with more than one thousand organizations as part of their video learning initiatives, and while each company’s goals and strategies are unique, nearly all of them encounter the same set of problems when it comes to including video in employee training.

Challenge 1: Storing Video Files

You’ve finished recording a video. Congratulations! Now where do you put it? It’s a simple question with a complicated answer because video files are enormous.

Consider, for reference, that a one-minute-long video recorded with an iPhoneX at 1080p resolution will produce a file that’s roughly 175MB in size. To illustrate just how big that is, let’s compare it to a massive text-based document. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a hefty 1440-page tome consisting of over 587,000 words, yet it takes up only 2MB as a Microsoft Word document.

The comparative size of video files becomes a practical problem when we consider where most businesses store their learning materials: in an LMS like Saba or Cornerstone, or a CMS like SharePoint.

The problem is that the default maximum file size of those systems is typically set between 50-100MB. As of this writing, the default maximum file size you can upload to SharePoint, out-of-the-box, is 50MB. Cornerstone has a default maximum file size of 100MB. And most other popular LMSs have similar limitations. This leaves us with an obvious challenge: even a one-minute video exceeds our file size limits!

Of course, most organizations can and do take steps to increase the file size maximums in their LMS and CMS systems. But those steps can only go so far. Today, most LMSs and CMSs still set a hard cap at 2GB maximum per file. At 175MB per minute, we’ll only be able to record about 11 minutes of video before our file exceeds that limit as well. But how many town halls, classroom trainings, and executive keynotes come in under 11 minutes?

For longer recordings, which typically make up the majority of business recordings, a new set of headaches emerges. In order to make these videos available, someone will first need to
spend valuable time compressing and converting video files to the right bit rate, the right frame rate, and the right resolution that will allow the video to be uploaded to an LMS. These are complex technical production steps that often require expensive software or outside specialists.

With so many challenges to using LMS and CMS systems, some organizations will throw up their hands and simply upload their videos to their enterprise file sharing systems (be they simple network LAN drives or web-based solutions like Google Drive or Dropbox). While these systems typically won’t have similar file size limitations, they present other challenges related to file formats, discoverability, and analytics.

Challenge 2: Video File Formats

A quick thought exercise: try to think of a digital video format that you’re confident will play on all of your employee’s devices. If you need a hint, here are a few possibilities: AVI, MP4, FLV, MPG, WMV, MOV, QT, ASF, 3GP, WMA, and M4V.

Any guesses?

It’s actually a trick question. We have no way of knowing whether a video file is compatible simply by looking at its file type. The reason is that video files are more complex than still images or text documents. Specifically, video files are made up of two parts — containers and codecs.

Consider a video file, MyTraining.mov. The .mov file extension is the container. It’s simply a shell for what’s inside the file. Within the container are audio and video codecs, and it’s these codecs that determine whether the file will play on your employees’ devices. So simply by looking at the .mov extension, we can’t tell whether the file consists of low-quality webcam video with no sound at all, or 4K video with five channels of theater-quality audio. And if an employee’s device doesn’t support just one of the many potential codecs inside the file, your viewers will see an error message when they click play.

Codecs have evolved over the years, and different recording tools create videos with different codecs. So to ensure that your videos play on your employees’ devices, someone would first need to convert (or “transcode”) them into to formats that are compatible with web browsers and devices currently available in the market. As with compressing for file size, transcoding files is another complex technical production step that may require expensive software or specialists.

Challenge 3: Delivering Video

Solved the twin challenges of size and formatting that make video storage a problem? Fantastic. Now you’ve got a new question to answer: what happens to your network when people start pressing play?

Whether your people are watching remotely or on-site, and whether they’re using their desktops, laptops, or mobile devices, delivering video can be a serious challenge to corporate networks. The culprit, more often than not, isn’t the video itself — it’s the system where you’ve chosen to store your videos.

Whether it’s an LMS, a CMS, or an enterprise file sharing solution, most content repositories deliver video files the same way they deliver text or image files. When
an employee downloads a training manual from your LMS, the file is downloaded in its entirety. Once downloaded, it can be opened. This approach works well enough when you’re working with 2MB documents. It’s completely insufficient, however, when dealing with multi-gigabyte video files.

If that same employee were to click play on a training video hosted in your LMS, the LMS would attempt to deliver the video file in its entirety—no differently than the training manual. For a 2GB video on a 25Mbps network, it’ll take over 10 minutes to receive the full file. If your employee is on a faster 100Mbps connection, it will still take about 3 minutes.

As the video starts to download, it will also begin to play. Unfortunately, videos often play faster than they download, and this leads to dreaded delays in playback called buffering. Buffering forces a video to pause until more of it has downloaded.

Why is buffering dreaded? Because when videos buffer, viewers leave. Industry research shows that just one buffering event decreases the amount of video watched by 39%. Simply put, if viewers experience buffering, they become much more likely to abandon your video and look for the information elsewhere.

In addition to buffering, there’s another challenge of downloading videos in their entirety. On many mobile devices, there isn’t enough space to store a 2GB video. The result? Failed playback.

Keep in mind that the challenges above apply to videos that are made available on-demand. An additional set of challenges arise if you want to broadcast your video live. For example, if you’re using a traditional content repository like SharePoint or your LMS, you’d need to manually connect and configure a dedicated live streaming server in order to enable live streaming.

Regardless of whether you’re delivering video live or on-demand, you need a system for delivering video that minimizes friction for the viewer and doesn’t compromise the flow of data on your network.

Challenge 4: Finding Information In Videos

Finding information in videos is like doing research in a library. Both involve a two-step process. In the library, the first step is to find the right book, and the second is to find the right page in the book.

But imagine a library in which there’s no order to the arrangement of books on the shelves and no Dewey Decimal System to help find the right book. And imagine if the books themselves had no table of contents, no index, and no chapter markers.

Believe it or not, this is the same way we look for information stored in videos. With video search, the first step is to find the right video in your collection. The second step is to find the precise moment in the video where the relevant topic is discussed. Traditional approaches to video search frequently fail at step one and don’t even begin to address step two.

The reason is that your CMS, LMS, file sharing systems, and even YouTube don’t look at the actual content of the videos themselves — the words spoken by presenters or shown on-screen. Instead, when these systems search video, they do so using information about the video, such as the title, description, and tags. This approach is wildly insufficient for videos longer than 2-3 minutes.

Consider a recorded instructor-led training session, 45 minutes in length. On average, the trainer will speak 125 words per minute, so during the session, approximately 5,625 words will be spoken. Even if 90% of those words are of little value to search (e.g.: conjunctions like and, pronouns like she, prepositions like after, determiners like those), that still leaves 563 words in the video that would be valuable to search. Attempting to manually tag every one of those terms would take an enormous amount of time. Assuming we could add a new tag every five seconds, it would take about 47 minutes to include all 563. That’s longer than the video itself.

Because effective tagging is so time-consuming, most organizations add very few tags to each video. According to a University of Minnesota study, video publishers added nine tags on average to any given video. In our example above, those tags would cover less than two percent of the valuable content. The remaining 98% will be invisible to any employee searching for the content.

But that isn’t the end of the problem. Even if we’d painstakingly added all 563 tags to the video, those tags would still only help employees find the starting point of the recording. In most cases, your people don’t want to watch training videos in their entirety. Instead, they’re looking for precise moments in the video that contain insights on a particular topic. With traditional video search, the only solution is to click randomly through the timeline or take the time to watch the full recording.

Of course, a search is usually completed in seconds, and even inefficient searches take no more than a few minutes. But over the course of a year, those minutes do add up. According to McKinsey, the average knowledge worker spends nearly 20% of their time each week searching for information they need to do their jobs effectively — that’s an entire day each week.

Video has traditionally been the least searchable type of data in the enterprise, and the inefficiency of finding specific information in this medium not only costs your people a disproportionate amount of time, but for many organizations, also winds up devaluing the entire format as employees learn they’re better off looking elsewhere for quick references.

Challenge 5: Tracking Video-Based Learning

In school, students earn a degree by attending classes, progressing through educational tracks, and showing proficiency in the concepts they learned.

Now, imagine a school where instructors don’t take attendance, students can’t interact with the instructor or ask questions, and students don’t take tests or receive grades that demonstrate what they’ve learned. That’s what happens when businesses incorporate video into their learning and development initiatives without any means to gather data on audience engagement, viewing behavior, or learner comprehension for those videos.

Standard LMS, CMS, and enterprise file storage systems typically provide very little data about how employees may be engaging with video-based training content. Most enterprise file storage systems and CMSs, for example, offer no data at all about who has accessed a piece of content. There’s simply no way to know which employees have watched which videos hosted there.

Learning management systems typically offer more, but still don’t provide the level of granularity required to understand viewing trends and engagement. For example, some LMSs can report on the number of times a video was played and whether the video was watched to completion. However, most can’t report on how many times segments within the video were watched and rewatched. That can be a critical oversight when evaluating which content is problematic for learners. Trainers need data that shows what’s working well and what isn’t, so they can make iterative changes to training strategies and curriculum.

In the classroom, students’ questions and one-on-one conversations with the instructor can help inform the trainer where the curriculum could be improved. Quizzing also helps instructors understand where learners are struggling. If everyone is answering the same question incorrectly, it’s a good indication that the training could be improved.

With traditional LMSs and CMSs, however, it’s much more difficult to connect the dots in order to understand whether a training video was effective in helping an employee become proficient in a new skill or whether a specific part of the video missed the mark. No feedback options exist for video that replaces those interpersonal interactions with students. And most trainers don’t have access to tools that enable them to add quizzing to their video-based training content — or, at best, quizzing is disconnected from the actual training video and completed separately.

As educators, corporate trainers know that data can play an important part in developing and refining learning activities and materials. And for leaders in learning and development, data is an essential part of proving the value of their team’s efforts (as well as for making the case for future investments in new team members and technologies). Yet this data often simply doesn’t exist in the traditional systems companies use to manage their videos.

So what’s the solution to all these challenges?

All-In-One Video Training Software

For most organizations, creating and managing training videos requires a complex map of disconnected systems and software. Today a business may easily use eight different video solutions for:

Recording on-demand video
Recording screen content
Live streaming events
Editing videos
Compressing and transcoding videos
Indexing video content for search
Storing and playing videos
Optimizing video delivery across the corporate network

It’s expensive and inefficient to manage video this way. Moreover, doing so would be comparable to toting around a laptop, WiFi hotspot, mp3 player, digital camera, GoPro camcorder, GPS tracker, and telephone — it no longer makes sense to carry all that equipment separately when you can get all those tools and more in a single smartphone.

For video, there is now a single technology that solves the biggest challenges businesses face when it comes to using video to enhance employee training: a video content management system, or video CMS. Read about how a video CMS solves the top 5 challenges to training with video in our latest white paper.

Download The White Paper >>

The post The 5 Biggest Challenges To Training With Video appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

We live in an era of increasingly broad and capable solutions. Today’s talent management suites manage virtually every aspect of the employee experience, from recruitment to review to retention. Customer relationship management systems like Salesforce serve us throughout the customer lifecycle, from prospecting and sales to technical support and contract renewals. And marketing
automation systems enable everything from lead generation to email and social marketing to one-to-one tailored marketing messages.

Yet for most organizations — even those with thousands of recordings in their video collection — creating and managing video requires a complex map of disconnected systems and software. Today a business may easily use eight different video solutions for:

Recording on-demand video
Recording screen content
Live streaming events
Editing videos
Compressing and transcoding videos
Indexing video content for search
Storing and playing videos
Optimizing video delivery across the corporate network

What exactly is a video CMS?

A video CMS is a secure, central platform designed for creating, managing, and sharing video content. It’s a single system built specifically to overcome the challenges of training with video at scale.

Here’s How a Video CMS Solves the Challenges of Training with Video

1. No storage limits

A video CMS is built to store multi-gigabyte video files and multi-terabyte video libraries. There is theoretically no upper limit on the size of a video file you can upload or the number of videos you can store in your video CMS. Even if you’re sharing an eight-hour video from an all-day training event (a video file that may easily be 30-40GB in size), you can upload it as-is to your video CMS.

How is that possible?

Most video CMSs offer a cloud-hosted option, which takes advantage of plummeting cloud storage prices and economies of scale that bring cloud storage costs to almost zero. These systems were designed to scale up, so even as your video library grows larger, your costs don’t increase.

That ability to scale has been proven over the last decade. While somewhat newer to the enterprise market, the modern video CMS was originally designed to meet the video needs of today’s universities — many of which, for accessibility reasons, now record every lecture in every classroom on campus.

As such, many universities are now home to enormous video libraries. The University of Essex, for example, a relatively small school in the UK, captured 80,000 hours of new video content in the first year it began storing and managing its videos in a video CMS. The University of Arizona, meanwhile, now captures and stores 3,000 hours of video in their video CMS each week.

Why does this matter?

Most businesses host no more than a fraction of what the average university stores in their video libraries. So even as your company produces more video-based knowledge, you won’t ever encounter a file size limit or need to buy more storage space — a video CMS will automatically scale to meet your needs.

2. Automated video file formatting

Today’s video CMSs include built-in transcoding engines that ensure every video in your library will be automatically encoded into one or more broadly accepted video formats for streaming.

From a production standpoint, that means a video CMS will do the heavy lifting for you, standardizing every video you upload, regardless of the file type, so it can be played back on any device. And from a productivity standpoint, that means no one in your organization will ever have to spend time testing and converting video files again.

Of course, exactly how this is done varies from one video CMS to another. But generally speaking, the system is programmed to automatically reproduce every file uploaded to the video library (whether that file is new or old, and no matter how it was originally recorded) in one or more widely-available file formats.

For example, as of this writing, re-encoding a video into an MP4 file format composed of the H.264 video codec and the AAC audio codec will play on the current version of virtually every available web browser, all iOS devices, and well over 90% of Android devices.

Asking a production specialist to do all this for every video in your library would be a massive undertaking. Your video CMS will do all this automatically, typically in no more than a few minutes per recording. And depending on your video CMS, you may even be able to process multiple videos simultaneously.

Better still, as technology evolves and common video file formats change, a video CMS will adapt to those changes for you. Release updates from your video CMS will support new formats, ensuring no one in your organization has to worry about staying up to date with technical video specs.

Whether you have existing training videos in a variety of different file formats, or you’re capturing new training videos, your video CMS will automatically make all of your videos playable on any of the wide range of devices employees use.

3. Network-friendly video streaming

In theory, solving the challenges of storage capacity and format compatibility should make it possible for you to share any video you select with any audience you choose. As a practical matter, however, there’s one more important technical hurdle to clear for most organizations: the available bandwidth on your network.

A video CMS can also assist here through the use of “modern video streaming.” This approach to video delivery is the same one used by Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube to deliver consumer video at massive scale to millions of viewers around the world.

With modern streaming, employees don’t download videos in their entirety. Instead, the video CMS splits each video into tiny sequential segments (called “chunks”). These chunks are then sent to the employee’s device one-by-one, played by the device, and then thrown away. As a result, devices like smartphones and tablets with limited storage never run the risk of running out of space.
Modern streaming also enables your video library to adapt to changing network latency through a process called “adaptive bitrate streaming.” With adaptive bitrate streaming, the video CMS creates multiple versions of each video in your library. Each version represents a different quality level (measured by “bit rates”). For example, a simple adaptive bitrate algorithm might create three quality levels:

A high-quality video at a high bitrate
A medium quality video at a medium bitrate
And a lower quality video at a lower bitrate

During playback, the video CMS optimizes playback for the viewer’s network connection by continuously detecting the available bandwidth in real time. As bandwidth drops, the video CMS dynamically adjusts the quality of the video stream. So even if the viewer’s connection changes during playback, the video CMS will adjust the quality and bitrate of the video stream accordingly.

Imagine that an employee is viewing a training video on her smartphone while riding the train into work. Her connection starts strong, but weakens as the train goes underground. The server streaming the video will drop playback to a medium bitrate. If there’s further network congestion, playback will drop to a low bitrate stream. As congestion clears up, the stream ratchets back up to
medium, and hopefully back to the high bitrate stream when her cellular signal strengthens.

The viewer, meanwhile, sees a video that starts almost immediately and streams without buffering. And that’s important since viewers typically start to abandon a video within two seconds of buffering.

A video CMS that uses adaptive bitrate streaming will ensure viewers get the best possible playback experience on any network connection or device. Compared to the way video plays when its stored in other file sharing systems, adaptive bitrate streaming minimizes the start time and buffering for the viewer, as well as the strain video can put on your corporate network. It’s simply a better experience for the employee that will also make your IT team happy.

4. Search the words inside your videos

Along with all the file management and playback optimization that’s done when you upload a video to a video CMS, there’s another important step these systems will automatically take for you:

All of the content of your recording, including every word spoken by the presenter and every word shown on-screen, will be indexed for search.

Unlike the older systems that rely only on manual tags and titles to support search, a video CMS applies two newer technologies to make it possible for your employees to search the information in your recordings far more comprehensively:

Automatic speech recognition (ASR), which extracts the audio from a video, recognizes what’s being said, timestamps it, and adds it to a search index.
Optical character recognition (OCR), which recognizes the text that appears on-screen (in PowerPoint slides and on-screen recordings), timestamps it, and adds it to the search index as well.

With the all the content inside of your videos indexed, employees can search training videos just like they would a text-based document in your knowledge base. Not only can they find any video from your library in which a topic is addressed, but they can also fast-forward to the exact moment in the video that’s most relevant to their searches — within seconds.

A video CMS makes all the information within your videos instantly discoverable for anyone at your organization, and it means you’ll never have to waste time manually tagging videos or pecking through the timeline in a 30-minute recording to find a specific topic of interest.

5. Advanced video analytics

While traditional content repositories provide limited information on video viewing trends and engagement, a video CMS can provide a much richer source of information.

User analytics in a video CMS can show you who’s watched what and where they stopped watching minute-by-minute, enabling you to confirm virtual attendance in a course, as well as completion. Meanwhile, aggregate data for training videos enables instructors to see where engagement tends to drop off. Sizable dips in viewership can help instructors pinpoint segments they may want to rework.

Conversely, if employees search for specific ideas and begin watching a video at a particular point, instructors will see that spike as well. In addition, many video CMSs provide instructors with other insights through direct engagement with employees. Within the video, employees can ask questions and participate in threaded discussions. This often provides instructors with feedback that helps identify parts of a course that aren’t connecting with the audience, or are of particular interest.

Interactive quizzes have also become a standard capability of most video CMSs. These make it possible to check viewers’ comprehension of key concepts throughout the video as they are taught. Quizzing not only reinforces learning for students but also informs instructors of key points in the training that they may need to clarify.

These analytics capabilities typically integrate with learning management systems. For example, quiz results can often be transferred to the LMS gradebook, video viewing statistics and completion data can be shared with the LMS via SCORM, and if the video CMS offers public APIs, they can be used to programmatically integrate video reporting with even more systems.

Why Do You Need A Video CMS For Employee Training?

A video CMS is built to specifically solve each of the top challenges of training with video, enabling trainers and content creators to focus on developing employees using today’s most effective tactics — not managing files and technical systems.

In our full white paper, we dive into the top 5 challenges that most businesses struggle with when they try to include video in their employee training programs and how a video CMS is the best solution for organizations who want to leverage video for learning.

Download the free white paper >>

The post How a Video CMS Solves the Challenges of Training with Video appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Using on-demand video for employee training is no longer a novel idea. It’s the new normal.

But you already knew that. Afterall, anyone who has spent time in a corporate or professional training role in recent years has seen the benefits of using video to support employee training. From maximizing the effectiveness of your learning events to empowering employees to learn from each other, there isn’t a trainer we’ve met who doesn’t have a long list of reasons for doing more with video.

Short of face-to-face communication, there is simply no better way to share knowledge than through video. In fact, studies have shown that employees are 75% more likely to learn by watching a video than reading written documents, emails, or web articles.

So why hasn’t every company capitalized on video to enhance their training strategies? Why are some businesses choosing to invest in travel costs and physical classroom training without investing in technologies that make in-person training available on-demand to more of the organization?

Reasons vary from organization to organization, of course, but for many, it’s simply complacency. Some businesses are comfortable relying on what’s always worked before. Some just don’t make it easy for teams to experiment with new training methodologies.

Others may not realize there’s an opportunity to dramatically improve the competitive advantage they think they already have. Leaders outside of L&D often don’t have visibility into the data that reveal potential ROI from making such an investment. In other words, they have little insight into how much the company could be saving, while simultaneously improving learning throughout the company.

In L&D it’s your job to impact your company’s bottom line by cultivating one of its most valuable assets — knowledge — but it can still be challenging to convince leaders in your organization to support a fundamental change in the way you do employee training.

Good news: we’ve put together a simple, yet thorough, guide to help you spark the kind of change to your employee training processes that will have both immediate and lasting impact on the business.

3 Steps To Supporting Employee Training With Video

Video-based employee training strategies can act as a flywheel for learning within your company when enacted with a little planning. Of course, iterative changes are always easier to implement than systemic changes, which is why we’ve broken down the process of leading the change to build a video-enhanced employee training program into three steps. For a more detailed look at the process be sure to download the complete guide.

Step 1: Make The Case For Video-Based Employee Training At Scale

Fortunately, early adopters of video-based training in L&D have already drawn many data points that can help you make the case for expanding your use of video in employee training. Here are a few to get you started:

Within one week of a training session, the average employee will have forgotten 65% of the materials covered. After six months, that number jumps to 90%. On-demand training videos give employees access to revisit training sessions, providing a valuable tool for helping your employees retain new information.
40% of training budgets are spent on travel costs. If you’re looking for ways to expand training without adding more budget, both live and on-demand video-based training help you do just that. Instead of giving the same training in multiple locations, you can stream it live and record it once for your entire workforce.
Microsoft built its own video portal to expand its usage of video in employee training. The company estimated it was able to reduce the costs of training from approximately $320 per hour per employee to just $17. You don’t even have to build your own corporate video portal like they did.
Employees only have 24 minutes a week to focus on training and development, so making training videos available on-demand means that employees can access critical information in the flow of work when they need to solve a specific challenge.
Video-based training ensures everyone receives the same information and provides a portable, consistent learning experience. This can be critical for many subjects such as compliance training or anything policy-related.

Step 2: Plan Your Video-Based Employee Training Initiatives

You’ve made the case that you could be improving learning with video. Now, how do you do it?

In our Beginner’s Guide To Using Video For Employee Training, we detail 14 powerful ways you can use video to modernize your employee training program. Check out our top 10 tips below and be sure to download the complete guide before you go!

10 Tips For Enhancing Employee Training With Video

Improve your new employee onboarding process. Get your new hires up to speed faster and make their experiences more consistent.
Make basic skills training universally available. Cover the basics that are unique to your company including how to book conference rooms, set up email signatures, install printers, and more.
Provide on-demand training for new managers. On-demand leadership training videos give new and existing managers a detailed resource for honing their management skills.
Provide consistent, up-to-date training for front-line employees. Make sure those busy employees interacting with customers at any location have the most current information they need to offer exceptional customer experiences.
Enable your sales team. Give your sales professionals one tool that makes training more engaging, internal communications and reporting lightning fast, and connecting with prospects more meaningful.
Role play with video. Even if someone is a natural when it comes to interacting with customers, role-playing in recorded videos gives employees and managers solid insight into behaviors that can be improved upon or shared with other teammates as an example of what to do in certain situations.
Enhance compliance training. Video training can be an especially effective way to cover delicate and important compliance issues, including emergency procedures, sexual harassment laws, and more.
Expand the reach of live training events or conferences. Attendance at your events isn’t always possible for every employee, and when your events are packed with so much valuable information, nearly everyone will want to revisit parts of the event afterward.
Capture and share expert knowledge. Everyone is an expert in something. Video helps preserve your experts’ knowledge (even if they leave the company) and makes information a co-worker has available on-demand, even if they’re busy or out of the office.
Capture knowledge shared in meetings. Recording business meetings can create a useful record of the whys and hows of past decisions, the ideas that were brainstormed, and the insights exchanged. Some companies are even using video to flip their meetings.

Watch an example on-demand training video for hiring managers:

Step 3: Familiarize Yourself With Video Training Technologies

Video is not like other content. These days it’s easy to record training videos but, typically, much harder to share them. From hosting to security, and even to searching their contents, there are unique technical challenges to scaling video without the right technology.

You’re probably already using technologies that support your employee training goals such as an LMS, SharePoint, and other employee collaboration suites — but these often don’t offer great support for video. YouTube isn’t a good place for hosting employee training videos. And when it comes to video software for employee training, in particular, there are many point-solutions for everything from e-learning authoring tools to video role-play software. Where do you even begin?

For starters, you want to invest in a tool that solves your video training problems, without requiring anyone in your organization to become an expert in video production. That little caveat narrows your options down quite a bit, actually.

Ultimately, most organizations find the best solution is a video platform that is easy to use, designed for learning, flexible in its training applications, and integrates easily into existing technologies.

Here are a few of the features you should look for in a video training platform:

Simple, flexible options for recording and editing videos.
Secure, unlimited video hosting.
Inside-video search that doesn’t require tagging.
Video streaming on any device.
Detailed, user-level video analytics.

The Complete Beginner’s Guide To Using Video For Employee Training

In our latest white paper, we walk you through each of the above steps in detail: making the case for enhanced video training, selecting proven strategies you can use to expand your current training program, and familiarizing you with the specific video technologies that can make your investment in video-based training go even farther.