A view from Sam Crumley, VP of Employee Experience at Panopto

Prior to joining Panopto as VP of Employee Experience, I worked in a range of Learning and Development (L&D) and Human Resources roles. I covered a variety of sectors and worked for some of the biggest blue chip companies in the world. Naturally, during my time in these roles, I encountered a number of challenges along the way. This ranged from how to connect teams working in remote locations, to how to manage change effectively.

In a recent webinar delivered in association with Personnel Today, I outlined seven of the challenges I had faced in my previous jobs, how I solved them at the time and – crucially – how I would solve them now if I had known then what I know now about the potential of video to transform corporate culture by way of training and communications. The seven challenges I covered were:

• Knowledge Capture and Sharing
• Managing Performance Expectations
• On-Demand Field Training
• Microlearning
• Product Awareness Training
• Change Management
• Improving Distant Connections

I’m going to take you through each of these in turn and show how video can greatly enhance your approach to these kinds of L&D and HR challenges.

Video for Knowledge Capture and Sharing

In my first example, I reflected on my time at a specialist consulting firm. This consultancy had hundreds of billable employees spread across the country and no L&D function. Important organisational knowledge and expertise was concentrated in a few key staff members and in a few key resources, which amplified the challenges the company faced. These challenges centred around both the availability of those resources and staff members and proximity constraints when we needed to scale training to remote members of the team.

While these were significant issues that needed to be addressed,  I could also see even bigger opportunities to boost company culture by reinforcing core company values, finding better mechanisms by which we could recognize employee expertise, connecting employees in more meaningful ways and reducing ad hoc requests for resources.

At the time, the way we addressed the need to improve employee knowledge capture and sharing was to do annual, milestone-based training supplemented by live monthly events where knowledge sharing was encouraged. However, some problems persisted, manifesting themselves in three main ways:

• Much of the most important learning content was created “in the margins” as and when needed
• We had no analytics or assessment of the value or impact of our training and knowledge sharing activities
• We had a growing repository of standalone documents

When I consider how I’d do that project now, knowing what I know about video, here’s what I think a video-enabled solution would’ve looked like for that company. We could have:

• Created reusable videos capturing subject-matter experts
• Offered flipped training approaches in the lead-up to live events
• Analysed the usage of these videos and assessed staff satisfaction
• Better supported client work through the accessibility of video content
• Enabled the effective curation of videos through inside-video search

Video for Managing Performance Expectations

In another former role, I had to train managers in a new performance management process. Two key elements of this training project were helping them to reinforce performance expectations and effectively communicating what good practice looked like for people leaders.

As in the previous example, there were a number of opportunities to enhance company culture as part of this process. For instance, I felt we could use this as a way of increasing the visibility of senior leaders, of better aligning the expectations of people leaders and of reinforcing core company values.

So, how did I manage this project at the time? Well, we ran a ‘push’ campaign outlining the new process. This was supported by written instructions and guidance. We opted for a ‘cascading’ approach to the training, whereby divisions would own the process down the chain to the managers. While this had some advantages in terms of making the push campaign scale effectively, it also opened up the possibility that managers wouldn’t necessarily communicate in a consistent way with their line reports.  

Thinking about this scenario from my current perspective, what would a video-enabled solution to this challenge have looked like? Well, we could have:

• Created detailed video training which would be available on-demand, whenever needed
• Built up a bank of video resources to onboard new managers and which existing managers could refer back to in advance of performance discussions
• Tracked uptake and adoption of these materials
• Ensured the consistency of messaging by providing standard on-demand content, removing the need for managers to cascade information

Video for On-Demand Field Training

My third example was taken from my experiences working with a utility firm. This sector is facing some very imminent challenges, having, as it does, an aging workforce which collectively holds a vast store of highly specialised knowledge. Companies across this sector are trying to recruit new hires and bring them up to speed quickly, knowing that soon around 50% of their most experienced staff members are going to retire and, if the organisation isn’t careful, take all their knowledge with them.

In the company I was working with, there was also the issue that any live training events inevitably take productive workers out of the field.

However, as with any challenge, there were also opportunities. I saw this as a chance to overcome perceived generational differences, with the established workers able to mentor and train future cohorts and showcase the value of tenure and experience. I also felt it could really reinforce a culture of quality and safety amongst workers.

How did they solve these challenges then? Well, with a centralized L&D function responsible for content and a wealth of experienced staff members, creating a body of resources wasn’t too difficult. These resources were amplified by offering periodic live training, both at field locations and centrally.

Thinking back on this now, I think that if we could have used video the end result would’ve been even better. We would’ve been able to:

• Engage the field staff in the creation of content in a much broader way by allowing more staff to record processes and procedures, especially by allowing them to use mobile devices out in the field.
• Retain the nuanced knowledge of retirees –  not just capturing what they know, but actually recording how they did certain things. This ‘embedded’ knowledge of physical, practical processes is hard to capture via any other medium, but video lends itself perfectly to this.
• Create updated/expanded videos as conditions changed.

Video for Microlearning

When I worked for a healthcare organisation, I became very aware of the potential benefits of just-in-time learning, or microlearning. The professionals I was dealing with were strapped for time but the organisation had understandably exacting standards for both compliance and patient outcomes. Staff were frequently assessed and so it was essential to create timely development activities that suited their fast-paced schedules.

As I thought about how best to support these employees, I realised that the right learning resources could better support personal growth and internal advancement. I also knew that an increased patient focus would only enhance the organisation’s brand and reputation. All of this would help enhance company culture considerably.  

We started to address the unique challenges of this organisation by instituting ‘break room’ training, so staff could access short chunks of microlearning when they were away from the wards. This was combined with virtual meetings. The company placed considerable emphasis on new hire training and used vendor materials to help train staff on specific tools and complex equipment. Professionals also created compliance-focused training on medical procedures.

So, knowing now what I know about video, how would I approach this project? Well, for a start, while we made significant headway with new hire training and supported ongoing learning through ‘break room’ training, we lacked a flexible tool to support true ‘on the go’ learning. With video, I would’ve created:

• On-demand and task-based videos (powering “what I need to know now” training)
• Mobile-enabled video content to keep staff with patients even if they needed to check something
• Resources for patient education to help them manage their own conditions more effectively after leaving the hospital
• Dynamic video content with quizzes to check comprehension for compliance and social features for discussion and knowledge sharing

Video for Product Awareness Training

Another role I reflected on during the webinar was the time I worked for a national financial services infrastructure company. This organisation had a particular emphasis on customer satisfaction and operated in a highly competitive industry. They had regional sales offices and centralized L&D support. ‘Pop-up’, shadow training occurred when corporate L&D was not able to offer support. Working with this DIY approach, rather than replacing it, was important as it offered an opportunity to identify learning ‘heroes’ and give them recognition for sharing their expertise.

So, how did I support learning in this scenario? I decided to draw from both the centralized L&D offering and the ‘DIY’, grassroots approach to create a hybrid learning environment. I used the corporate Learning Management System (LMS) to host content and worked with various departments to make decisions on exact content and delivery. However, training material was usually created by employees rather than instructional designers. This allowed them to leverage the convenience and consistency offered by the centralized resources, while ensuring that learning resources felt highly relevant.

What would a video-enabled solution in this scenario have looked like? Well, it would have:

• Reinforced the creation of content by employees
• Allowed us to plug video into the LMS without complex formatting
• Ensured the reusability of content across sales and support
• Offered senior management better visibility of the consumption of training materials
• Enabled content to be more searchable to support just-in-time learning

Video for Change Management

I have been involved in many change management projects during the course of my career. In one role, the organisation in question was going through a major change – moving from offering in-house Learning and Development to a fully outsourced model for content planning, development, delivery, LMS administration and end-user support.

This project offered us the opportunity to reinforce the focus on quality and customer service at the organisation, celebrate the uniqueness of its business model within the industry and re-examine how to quickly integrate new hires for high turnover roles.

When I designed the change management approach at the organisation, I ensured a high degree of stakeholder involvement at all stages to make sure we kept up engagement levels. This involved a lot of travel to get a real-world view of people’s needs and opinions. I also created a new workflow for centralized leadership training and new group onboarding resources.

Looking back, I think that with video the initiative could’ve been executed even more effectively. It would’ve allowed us to make training materials more consistent regardless of which instructor created the training and where they were based. We also would’ve been able to capture the cultural quirks of the organisation via video in a way that was difficult to achieve otherwise. Here’s what I would have added to the original change management mix:

• Demonstration videos for departments and locations
• Video feedback and short video insights into issues from the different office regions
• More on-demand video options to reduce travel for face-to-face training
  

Video to Improve Distant Connections

The last example I gave during the webinar related to my experience facilitating training and communications amongst remote teams. While many organisations I have worked with operated in different regions, the example I chose was when I worked for a Canadian government authority delivering services across broad territories with limited budget. This organisation had turnover and staffing challenges. Employees were often based in incredibly remote locations, making face-to-face training options difficult.

Looking at the opportunities I had to enhance company culture, I knew it would be important to reinforce connections with the main office and break down misconceptions or lack of understanding between locations. I also wanted to improve regional expertise and open up career development opportunities for the remotely located workers.

The approach I took at the time involved periodic travel to the main office and the creation of centralized content that we ‘shipped out’ to other locations. Virtual meetings were used to bring remote teams together and offered a mix of internal and external content creation.

How do I think video would have helped in this scenario? Well, it would have allowed me to:

• Create content in a more distributed model with more input from the remote teams
• Collect regional expertise more easily
• Increase visibility of the L&D function with less travel
• Maintain the organization’s branding without buying external content
• Offer downloadable video content options for those with bandwidth challenges
• Create internal and external versions of content more efficiently
  

Tips for leading a cultural transformation with video-supported training and communications

So, thinking about all the examples I’ve given, what would I say to a fellow L&D, HR or Employee Engagement professional thinking of using video to solve their learning and communications challenges and enhance company culture? I would emphasize:

• Focusing on the pain points to make sure the video solution addresses the most important issues
• Engaging users in creating both workflows and content to ensure relevance
• Leveraging (and integrating with) the technology in place – for instance, the LMS

Once you’ve begun, how do you drive video adoption? In this case, I would suggest:

• Confirming the cultural impacts for alignment and reinforcement
• Leaving flexibility for new use cases to emerge as people experiment with video
• Starting with the content, then considering the format

My final piece of advice would be to make sure you measure success. As well as looking at consumption of video content, I’d also advise measuring dimensions such as satisfaction, social interaction and, of course, the end results to the organisation. I would also look at the breadth and depth of your video content and the reusability of what you have to ensure you get the maximum benefit from enhancing your company culture with video.

Interested in using video to help transform your corporate culture? Contact our team to request a 30-day free trial.

You can access an on-demand version of the webinar in which I originally presented these ideas on the Personnel Today website here: https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/improve-company-culture-by-using-video-webinar/

The post Seven Ways To Use Video To Transform Your Company Culture appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

For businesses in today’s knowledge economy, people are one of their most valuable assets. It’s why leading enterprises are increasingly investing in supporting how their people communicate and share information at work.

Video, because of its ability to convey information more quickly and with more depth than text, has largely become the preferred medium for communicating and sharing information. Nearly every department in the enterprise today is seeking ways to leverage video for enhancing employee and customer journeys. And as a result, industry analysts predict that the enterprise video market is poised for continued growth.

In the latest release of the Aragon Research Globe  for Enterprise Video, the independent analyst group examine current market trends and analyze 17 video technologies that support businesses in both their increasing use of video and their congruent demand for video content management (or what Aragon describes as the Corporate Netflix).

We’re honored that, for the second year in a row, Aragon Research has recognized Panopto as a “Leader” in the Enterprise Video market.  

Access the 2018 Aragon Research Globe here >

Aragon praised Panopto for its complete video product offering and notable strengths that include live event streaming, robust video search, and integrations with learning management systems, content management systems, and video conferencing solutions.

Live Event Streaming

Panopto features one-click live webcasting that enables businesses to securely stream live events, such as town halls or quarterly meetings,  to thousands of viewers anywhere in the world. Live streaming with Panopto is not only easy but also reliable. Our platform is built for stable, HTML5-based streaming, which means we are able to deliver the highest quality videos, for every viewer, on any device. And in the event a stream is interrupted, Panopto’s fail-safe recording ensures the stream starts where it left off when it comes back online.

Video Search

With Panopto businesses have the ability to search their entire video library for pertinent videos — even the content within those videos. Panopto’s advanced video search engine indexes the words spoken and shown on screen in every video uploaded to the platform, enabling users to find and fast-forward to the exact place their search appears. This ability to search video content just like we search emails, PDFs, or the web dramatically expands the ways enterprises can use video to capture and share information.

Video Integrations

Increasingly, organizations need to manage videos across multiple channels and multiple applications, and it’s important that employees can access video tools from the systems they already use. Panopto includes support for an ever-growing list of integrations with leading learning management systems (LMSs), content management systems (CMSs), and video conferencing tools. We also enable businesses to customize and extend Panopto’s video platform into existing IT infrastructure via our developer APIs, WANop integration, and more.

“In the last year, Panopto has substantially expanded its partner network and the core capabilities of its product,” said Jim Lundy, Aragon Research founder, CEO and author of the report. “These investments have allowed Panopto to extend its footprint in both the enterprise and higher education, with a focus on video-based learning and live event streaming.”

Want to see what a “Leader” in enterprise video looks like? Try Panopto free for 30 days.

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It’s unfortunate, but sooner or later, it’s bound to happen. Every company experiences “brain drain” when a key subject matter expert leaves the company.

Often when an employee hands in notice, a mad rush follows in the hopes of hiring and training a replacement before the expert’s last day at the office. Unfortunately, there is typically never enough time for the incoming recruit to learn what he or she needs to know from the departing employee.

Managers are in a tough spot – a hasty hiring decision can lead to choosing the wrong person for the job. On the other hand, delaying the replacement hire could result in precious knowledge walking out the door with the departing employee.

Most organizations opt for mitigation – trying to capture as much of the employee’s institutional knowledge as possible before he or she leaves the company (some refer to this as offboarding).

Written documentation, such as a Wiki, is common, but the resulting pages upon pages of text and screenshots are too often more confusing than helpful – especially in technical fields or in cases where the author’s writing skills are less than perfect.

Video provides a faster, more efficient way of solving the brain drain problem.

With just an iPhone, a departing employee can quickly and easily record a series of short videos for his or her replacement to refer to. And with a laptop and its onboard camera (or an inexpensive webcam), your employee can capture the contents of his or her screen to demonstrate software, display a presentation, explain diagrams, and more.

Uploading these videos to your company’s video content management system (VCMS) enables any new employees and remaining team members to learn at their own pace, and review the videos on-demand from any device when needed. Panopto customers can even quickly access the information they need by searching through an entire video library for a specific word or phrase, then fast forward to that exact point in the recording.

Our own 2-weeks-notice experience.

When John Ketchpaw, a long-time member of our engineering team, decided to pursue his next professional adventure, we had three weeks to capture everything he knew. During that time, he recorded over ten hours of one-on-one meetings, screen recordings, and group meetings. The result was a seamless onboarding experience for our new hire, Bertrand Lee, and a repository of information that the rest of our engineers could refer to as they built upon John’s work.

To learn more about how we used video to capture knowledge and onboard a new employee, check out the video below.

If you’re interested in learning how video can help you with employee onboarding and social learning, request a free 30-day trial of Panopto’s industry-leading video platform today.

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It’s your roadmap. Your flag on a hill. Your big, hairy, audacious goal. Whatever your metaphor, your corporate vision and mission statements should be accessible, memorable presentations of who your company is, where you are going, and how you’ll get there.

So why is it that no more than a handful of your employees can tell you what those statements actually say?

Gartner Research just identified vision and mission onboarding video as one of the five greatest opportunities, and lowest risk ways organizations should be using video.

Simply put, presenting your vision and mission in video will make those all-important guiding principles easier for your team to find, to see, to share, and most importantly, to remember.

Best of all, this is one kind of business video you can complete and share in no time at all.

Your team likely still needs to see the traditional presentation deck in order to read your vision and mission statements. Simply by adapting that presentation to video, you can help your employees not only read those statements, but really take them to heart.

Creating A Vision And Mission Video

Creating the video is easy. Screen recording software will allow you to record your PowerPoint deck with animation. Depending on your software, you may be able to record yourself presenting as you click through the slides, or capture and sync that audio later.

Panopto users can record both PowerPoint and audio, as well as one or more streams of video to support your onboarding presentation as well. This way, you can share synced video both the deck itself and of you presenting it – so your audience can better connect with the message. You can even add other video streams – such as a member of your leadership team describing why your vision and mission will help your organization.

Once you’ve made your video presentation, sharing it is as easy as uploading it to your video content management system, and sharing the link. If you’re a Panopto user, your videos upload automatically, so making them available is a breeze.

Sharing your vision and mission statements by video is a great opportunity to help your employees better understand your organization and how their work contributes to your success.

Panopto makes recording and sharing executive communications easy. Want to give it a try? Sign up for a free 30-day trial today!

The post It’s Your Corporate Vision. Shouldn’t Your Employees Be Able To See It? appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Ever wonder why some companies have such happy employees? It’s more than just the chance to work on a quality product or reap a few extra benefits and perks.

If you ask them, those companies will tell you they work hard to create a happy culture. Here’s how video can help you do the same.

Zappos founder Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose is one of the most successful business books of recent years. And no wonder—it’s full of meaningful insight on what’s not working in the culture of many companies—and how business leaders can turn theirs around.

From his book come three strategies on this vital subject. To this we add our thoughts as to how video can help you carry them out.

A happy company encourages learning and growth.
Hsieh reports Zappos assigns required reading to employees to be completed on their own schedule. Their extensive training program includes classes like Company History; Intro to Finance; Company Culture; Science of Happiness 101; Communication 1, 2, and 3; and more.

Other companies have taken similar programs even further with video, using the visual element of the medium to better engage employees and help ideas connect and stick. Our customers tell us that supporting and scaling training is one of the biggest benefits they find with video — one that helps them deliver information in a way employees actually enjoy.

A happy company surprises their customers.
Hsieh writes that Zappos, takes great pains to ensure their customer service standard is much higher than their industry’s average. The company prides itself on service and communication, and regularly surprising customers better-than-promised delivery.

Many of our clients tell us they use video as a key part of setting their organization apart from their competition. Sales representatives that use video greetings and follow-ups create a unique, more personalized experience for their clients. Marketing professionals that make video a large part of the company website improve both Google rankings and site usability. Video FAQ QR codes are often a welcome addition to a product’s user manual—and these are just a few examples.

A happy company gives their employees happiness motivators.
Hsieh notes that Zappos not only implements external motivators like bonuses — the company also takes care to provide thoughtful, timely, and genuine performance feedback to help employees learn and grow.

Here too, as many organizations have found, video can be the perfect tool for coaching employees with effective feedback. Video enables trainers to include quizzes and comprehension tests to ensure viewers understand the lesson. And with video, employees can record themselves to practice their skills and watch themselves in action later—a recipe for a truly objective performance assessment.

Zappos has long been famous for its corporate culture — and while the company sets a high bar for corporate culture, that shouldn’t deter other organizations from trying to clear it. At Panopto, though, we think that similar success strategies are within the reach of almost any company — and having the right tools for the job can certainly help.

Tyler Cowen, author of the insightful book Discovering Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist, discusses which workplace elements provide the best employee motivation and help to build the strongest workplace cultures:

1. Effective, fast feedback
2. Cultural identification/company pride
3. Pride in one’s accomplishment
4. Regular challenges

Changing workplace culture can affect employee engagement in a long-term, sustainable way. Doing so can increase employee retention rates, boost productivity, and help corporate teams create truly happy employees.

4 Ways Video Can Engage Your Employees

For those organizations ready to take on the challenge of building a better internal culture, video can be a powerful tool. Here’s why:

Video helps employees receive effective, fast feedback on their progress.

When employees record videos, they don’t always do it for others — sometimes, it’s for their own enrichment instead. While taking part in online training allows for effective, fast feedback on their learning progress, watching themselves practice an important presentation offers the objectivity employees they need to improve. Peers and supervisors can use the video as well to provide added input and advice.

Video increases one’s cultural identification and company pride.

CEO video recordings, particularly those created using an informal, personal style, convey more than mere text in an email ever could. The same is true for company overview videos and culture pieces, as during employee onboarding. If you aren’t currently appealing to your employees’ emotional and cultural identification using this rich medium, you are missing out on a simple opportunity paying dividends that are truly inestimable.

Video allows for greater pride in one’s accomplishment.

For employee motivation, there’s almost nothing that’s as powerful as seeing the physical result of one’s hard work. With some jobs, though, such a reward can be hard to come by. However, with video, the knowledge one acquires after long-term employment can become a physical, concrete, sharable company asset. Best practices videos, FAQ videos and the like can be stored and shared for years to come. This not only saves the company training costs and valuable employee time—it also allows for that pride in accomplishment on the part of the employee that created it.

Video can facilitate various kinds of challenges.

With an effective video recording tool and video content management system (video CMS) in place, numerous avenues open up to almost all company departments. The sales team can create video reenactments of best sales practices. The marketing team can create real-life product demonstrations viewable by employees and customers alike. Subject matter experts (SMEs) can create FAQ-style videos, and anyone can easily record and share meetings with remote or absent employees.

Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, coauthors of Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth, say that research shows that challenges look easier when you’re happy—but it’s just as true that employees are happier when feeling more challenged. Video helps with both sides of this equation—and our customers’ real-life results convince us that the employee satisfaction they see as a result of their video systems are significant indeed.

Ready to try using video in your organization?

Panopto makes it easy for businesses and universities to record, manage, search, and share just about any kind of video. To see how Panopto can help you build your organization’s culture with video, contact our team for a free trial today.

The post 4 Secrets to Using Video to Create a Culture of Engagement appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

A red pen lives on the desk of almost every educator in every school and university.

That same red pen rests near the keyboard of every manager in every workplace.

That red pen has one job — to mark wherever a student or employee has made an error, misstated a point, or left out important information.

The red-lined review is a well-worn tradition for almost every type of written deliverable — from schoolhouse essays and homework assignments to workplace memos, presentations, spreadsheets, and almost anything and everything else that may be written down and shared.

Today, however, that tradition has run its course. Deliverables of all stripes are increasingly shifting to electronic formats. Files are shared by email or via dropboxes, to be read on laptops or tablets. The paper version is often never printed at all.

Already word processing tools like Microsoft Word and Google Docs have helped transition many of us away from ink, offering collaborative review tools like Track Changes and Review History. These tools give a modern update to the red pen — often even showing edits in brilliant #FF0000 color.

But just like the red pen itself, these tools have a fundamental limitation — they require the edits to be read.

As millions of teachers, managers, and writers around the world can attest, writing down an edit offers no guarantee that the original author will understand it. For reasons of handwriting, excessive brevity, limitations of space, and dozens of other factors, virtually all of us at one time or another have either misinterpreted an edit or had one of our own edits misinterpreted.

For students, those mistakes mean lower grades. For employees, those mistakes mean additional rounds of revision (and additional time spent on a project).

There’s a better way: record your feedback in a video.

At schools and universities, screen recording (or “screencasting”) has become a common video application. Recording one’s screen is simple and fast—and almost any computer and webcam will do.

New research indicates that screencasting can be a particularly adept way for teachers to provide comments and reviews on student assignments — even for deliverables like presentations or websites that can’t be manually or electronically marked up.

“Experimentation with screencasting technologies in traditional and online classes has yielded fresh approaches to engage students, improve the revision process, and harness the power of multimedia tools to enhance student learning,” write Riki Thompson of the University of Washington Tacoma and Meredith J. Lee of Leeward Community College.

The authors note that misunderstood edits are no small challenge for most students — the authors quote an anonymous student as saying: “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a paper back with underlines and marks that I can’t figure out the meaning of” — and go on to prescribe video as an easy potential remedy.

“We argue that screencast video feedback serves as a better vehicle for in-depth explanatory feedback that creates rapport and a sense of support for the writer than traditional written comments.”

Video reviews aren’t only helpful in academia. More and more professionals are finding video helps them to make clear the intricacies of their edits and ideas for their colleagues in a way that can be challenging in text.

In businesses and other organizations, many knowledge workers are finding that video is an ideal medium for providing edits and reviews.

While in the past, providing feedback on documents required making line-by-line changes in the original document (opening up a nightmare scenarios for document managers attempting to manage version control), or transcribing a list of requested edits in bullets (and hoping those bullets were detailed enough to properly communicate the necessary updates).

While line-by-line editing was time-intensive, it was still easier than more conceptual editing. Managers who wanted all or part of a deliverable revised to change the tone, the urgency of the message, or any number of other more ethereal-but-critical aspects of the document could only offer vague suggestions and hope the author would get the message.

Now though, video is helping businesses solve those inefficient cycles and misunderstood edits. Either as a supplement to traditional edits or an outright replacement, video gives managers the ability to open a deliverable on the screen of their computer, record themselves reviewing it (with or without changes tracked), and instantly share that full review with the original author — whether the author sits at a desk just a few feet away or in an office halfway around the world.

Watch an example video of a deliverable review below:

By recording the review, the manager helps to eliminate possible confusion in any line-item notes or edits made — and can call out why those edits are important so that the author can bear them in mind for future assignments.

And along with documenting the details, video also allows the reviewer to provide more specific insight on updates that may be needed in the deliverable’s tone or tenor. Comparisons may be more easily made inside the document (“I thought this was well said here, but this is off…”) or even outside the document (“See what our typical style looks like here” or “We want to position against what our competitor is doing here”).

Best of all, recording feedback can even help a team become more efficient over time. As new employees come onboard and new team members take up ongoing processes, having a video library of existing document reviews gives your team an accessible, searchable reference tool that can quite literally show them what’s expected in their assignments.

Try it for yourself!
Panopto makes screen recording easy. In just a few mouse clicks you can capture anything you show on your computer screen in high definition, record simultaneous video or audio commentary, and share your insights with anyone.

To see how Panopto can help your business or university provide better feedback, contact our team for a free trial today.

The post It’s Time To Retire The Red Pen appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

As business leaders reflect on last year’s results and implement improvement plans, the bottom line continues to be top priority. Yet as firms embrace new revenue streams and roll out new cost-savings initiatives, all too many overlook another internal investment that has proven to boost results — their people.

As a recent Deloitte survey shows, developing a business culture focused on purpose along with profits can help give companies the edge over their competitors. A strong sense of purpose boosts business confidence and confidence is infectious, attracting talent, encouraging investment and fuelling growth.

How Do Companies Create A ‘Culture Of Purpose’?

Effective training is vital, to ensure employees understand your company’s mission. 77% of employees surveyed by Deloitte believe ongoing training helps to achieve that all-important sense of purpose. But not all training methods are created equal — research suggests as much as 11% of employee training may be “unproductive learning”.

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Traditional training methods are often ineffective (manuals fall out of date soon after they’ve been produced), expensive (upwards of half the cost of off-site seminars is spent on travel alone), or incomplete (as senior employees are not always available to share their expertise) — and sometimes all three. Add to this a cubicle culture in which workers feel disconnected from management decisions and you have a recipe for disillusionment and high staff turnover.

Technology, especially video, is addressing these challenges by revolutionizing the way knowledge is shared and used. Using new software Learning and Development professionals can reach more people, more effectively than ever before. Improving access to information not only equips staff with the skills needed to achieve personal and organizational goals, but also fosters an open culture with a shared sense of purpose.

Here are 5 ways using video in employee training can help your company transform its culture.

 1. Speed up onboarding

For new hires to hit the ground running, managers need to quickly communicate large amounts of information. But with remote working and packed schedules, it’s not always possible to get recruits in the same room for face-to-face training. Instead, webcasting training sessions offers a cost-effective way to reach a large audience, offering the ability to communicate values and share up-to-date knowledge so that employees reach productivity quicker. Likewise, an on-demand video training library can help boost new employees’ confidence by giving them instant access to refresh and deepen learning.

 2. Improve staff development

In most organizations, every position has at least a handful of unique requirements and expectations. But most traditional training programs don’t incorporate tailored learning, and often, company experts are often too busy to deliver sessions and outline all those particular details. By using video, forward-looking businesses allow employees to learn at their own speed and focus on areas of weakness. A video content management system like Panopto also modernizes the concept of social learning — employees can record presentations and best practice demonstrations, then store them securely where they can be shared and discovered by colleagues whenever needed.

 3. Motivate and enable top talent

Experienced staff are a company’s most valuable resource — and keeping them on-mission is critical. Technology can help, by providing tools to help bosses manage their time and employees effectively. Briefings and updates can be recorded ahead of time and shared more widely on-demand, reducing the need to spend time in meetings. Maximising the contribution of your most talented employees raises the bar for all, creating brand ambassadors with a strong and infectious sense of purpose.

 4. Promote transparency

A more open culture allows an organization’s sense of purpose to thrive. Staff need to be kept abreast of developments in order to feel part of the team. Video can improve corporate communications, connecting employees to decisions made at a senior level. Video is even beneficial for day-to-day communications — in a world where Forrester Research reports employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than read text, a video can be a more effective means to share a message and stand out in an overflowing inbox.

 5. Encourage innovation

Closed-door cultures often stifle innovation. And who says only executives know what is best for a company? Video can be used to harness inspiration by creating a forum where employees share their thoughts on company policy or strategy changes. Software like Panopto allows videos to be searched to pinpoint details in the feedback. This is important on two levels — first, by giving the organization a means to seek collect and preserve ideas from any department or level all across the company, and second, by demonstrating to staff that the organization values their thoughts and contributions (itself a proven technique to increase employee loyalty and morale).

The positive impact made by empowered staff on company performance is one that leaders are already well aware of. According to this Forbes report more than 70% of organizations believe the problem of employee “capability gaps” is one of the most important they face. The digital revolution continues to advance the way information is shared and used, and platforms like Panopto offer powerful solutions to support corporate training and development challenges.

To find out more about how using Panopto for employee training can help your company build a culture of purpose, contact our team for a free 30-day trial.

The post 5 Ways Using Video in Employee Training Helps Build a Culture of Purpose appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

When seasoned learning and development professionals look at the oft-quoted 70-20-10 model, the first reaction can include despair or disbelief. If the model is to be believed, it would indicate that instructional design and classroom teaching only amounts to 10% of an employee’s learning at work — while twice as much of that learning comes from employee’s peers and seven times as much is due to lessons learned from actually accomplishing difficult tasks.

The good news for L&D professionals is that researchers in the field are increasingly finding that the fields defined by 70:20:10 are not as rigid as they may seem, and that holistic learning is a cumulative product of a tightly integrated loop of learning activities, including formal, social, and informal learning.

But the 70-20-10 model was onto something: the notion that learning is a product of doing.

When employees lack information they need to complete an important task, they either learn what they need to know, or they wait. Learning, then, is a product of need, rather than a learning calendar which might feel arbitrary in the grind of the day-to-day.

When learning is understood in this way, as an interconnected system of pervasive learning opportunities, a new opportunity for L&D professionals emerges. Coined the 3-33 model, pervasive learning acknowledges the equal roles (33% each) that formal, informal, and social learning play in employee learning. By creating formal training materials, facilitating social learning, and curating content for informal learning, L&D professionals can accelerate learning through instructional design that touches on all three aspects of how employees actually learn.

Of course, the content still needs to be relevant to the task at hand. eLearning with video has a role to play in making learning content available on demand, from anywhere, just when employees need it most, while online learning tools, in the hands of the employees themselves, can make social and informal learning effective at scale. By better delivering formal and informal learning content, and by facilitating social learning among employees, L&D teams can produce relevant, pervasive learning, for everyone in the organization, every day.

Related Reading: When There Isn’t Time For Learning, You Learn “In The Flow Of Work”

Delivering high-quality formal learning courses with live and on-demand video

The bread-and-butter of traditional training initiatives, formal learning is acknowledged in the 3-33 pervasive learning model for its importance as an integral piece of employee learning. Sometimes referred to as the “mortar” in the brick wall of corporate learning, formal learning can not only hold together other aspects of learning but also spark new avenues which, in turn, spawn new opportunities for informal and social learning.

Formal training taught in the classroom had two critical limitations that limited its benefit to a pervasive training initiative.

The first was inefficiency. Relying exclusively on classroom training was costly and logistically complex. eLearning and video have largely solved these problems, allowing employees to access distance learning through live webcast video courses, broadcast from a classroom somewhere across the country, or the conference room down the hall that was simply too full to accommodate additional participants. Recorded video gives employees any time, on-demand access, so scheduling conflicts can’t get in the way of learning. And, by eliminating travel, training budgets can be spent on instructional design and trainers, not hotel rooms and airfare.

The second issue was the limited volume of relevant content. Training teams are responsible for producing big results and, due to the limitations of in-person training, that meant leveraging economies of scale to train the largest group of employees. On-demand eLearning gave trainers new freedoms, to teach a lesson once, and then move on to the next topic. Instead of re-teaching a lesson each month or quarter, trainers can divide their attention between many topics and departments, and update the video only when the content needs to be updated.

Pervasive learning relies on content being relevant. Whether it is content that is “pulled down” by employees as they need it, or “pushed out” to them as it fits the organization’s needs, a larger library of training content and anytime, anywhere access makes it a reality for the first time. In some instances, organizations need not develop a dedicated course for distribution online: they can simply record their classroom presentations and, with minimal editing, make it available online.

Enterprise video platforms, designed with training teams in mind, make formal learning with video much easier. Unlike public-facing video platforms like YouTube or Vimeo, a “corporate YouTube” hosted in an enterprise video platform can be fully integrated with the existing learning management system and all of the text-based learning modules that have already been created. For instructional designers, the move to video to deliver eLearning can be a series of simple steps, adding videos where and when they best serve the content.

The move from traditional eLearning to eLearning with on-demand video can have huge benefits for establishing a pervasive learning initiative, just by making it a little easier to produce and share content, thereby speeding up the process and providing end-users with a more relevant library of learning content.

Informal Learning

L&D professionals can have a lot of fun producing materials that help their employees learn critical skills. Informal learning can come from almost any source. Content can come in almost any number of formats, including interviews, case studies, podcasts, written books and articles, and more. Need some examples? Listen to interviews on the Harvard Business Review’s Ideacast, or attend a local TEDx event. These examples make great fodder for informal learning initiatives and can be easily reproduced in-house. Hearing from thought leaders inside the company is a powerful way to get the rank-and-file excited about your learning initiative.

Enterprise video platforms make it simple to webcast a live presentation using little more than a laptop and an internet connection. But they also simultaneously record the events so L&D can create a “corporate YouTube,” a private place just for your organization, that makes it simple for anyone to access informal learning content on demand. Perkins Coie, a law firm with offices all over the United States, used Panopto to capture live presentations from company leaders and visiting professionals, so that everyone, not just the people in the room, could benefit from the information.

In a pervasive learning model, L&D has a critical role to play in creating content in a variety of formats. Multimedia formats — audio and video — are both easy to create and easy to consume. For the first time, ever, they’re also easy to produce using just a laptop, a webcam, and a microphone. And don’t discount audio-only presentations either. With mobile apps, employees can even tune into informal listening content as they work, on a business trip, or on their daily commute.

Social Learning

Challenges at work come up all the time, but not to every employee every day. Social learning turns a group of employees into a network of learners. By sharing their experiences and observing the consequences of actions taken around them, employees can augment the learning that any one employee could achieve on their own.

Not every employee has time to design a sophisticated and andragogically accurate eLearning lesson — that would be overkill for most any application of social learning — but almost everyone can narrate over a screen capture or slide presentation to share:

• Faster workflows for a given process or piece of software
• Solutions to sticky sales problems from the field
• Lessons learned from a recent misstep

In a pervasive learning model, L&D professionals should ensure that their employees have the tools they need to share knowledge. This includes both a simple, no-fuss way to record and automatically upload the content, and a way for the right people to find, view, and interact with the content that their colleagues have produced.

Through the use of ratings and comments, robust dialogs can crop up around an employee’s social learning video. Individuals can respond to questions, or with their own experiences to qualify the original video’s assumptions. Beyond the original awareness generated by social video, debate and discussion are powerful tools for closing the learning cycle.

L&D professionals can help move the needle further, by getting team managers and department heads to participate in social learning videos, both as a content producer and as a commenter. But it’s important to remember that even if a given employee isn’t participating actively in the social learning conversation, it doesn’t mean that they’re not learning. Being able to gauge an employee’s engagement through video analytics can help trainers quantify the benefit of “lurking.”

Calculate: How much is unshared knowledge costing your company?

Pervasive learning is training for any time, anywhere, and can come from anyone in your organization.

The Panopto video platform helps L&D organizations produce formal and informal training content, and facilitate social learning initiative. Using recorded, on-demand video, L&D professionals have an end-to-end tool to produce, store, organize, and share all of the content needed throughout their organization, and to create this content at a faster rate than ever before.

To see a demonstration of how Panopto can power your pervasive learning initiative, contact our team to sign up for a free trial.

The post Learning at the Speed of Need appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

In the past few years, businesses and universities have been generating new proprietary videos at an unprecedented rate.  The University of Arizona now captures more than 3,000 hours of video every week.  The University of Essex recorded over 80,000 hours of video in the 2013-2014 school year.  And according to Gartner, businesses around the world are amassing new video at a growth rate of up to 200% per year.

The question is, what happens to all those videos after they’ve been created? How are organizations getting value from the new videos being captured, and for that matter, from all the existing videos they’ve accumulated over the years?

For many corporations and academic institutions, this has become the biggest challenge of working with video.

Every day, Panopto talks with organizations who have video files scattered across their networks on file shares, SharePoint sites, and employee hard drives. These “video silos” make it nearly impossible for their people to find the video they’re looking for. And even if they do find it, there’s no guarantee that the video will play on the smartphone, tablet, or laptop that they happen to be using.

If videos can’t be found, and if they can’t be reliably watched on different devices, then all of the valuable content stored within them is locked away, and the videos are of little use.

Video content management systems (video CMSs) are built to address these challenges. A video CMS provides a central location for storing organizational media. It makes video universally available on any device. It provides a familiar YouTube-like interface for people to access the videos. And most importantly, a video CMS enables people to find and fast forward to content inside videos as easily as a search for words inside emails and documents.

With a video CMS, businesses and universities simply need to determine how to most efficiently get all of their new and existing videos into the system.

For small media collections, many video CMSs make it easy to import videos through a drag-and-drop interface. But if videos are scattered across multiple locations on the network, the task becomes more complex. And because new videos will continue to be generated by individuals and departments across the organization, a more systematic, automated approach to centralizing video is often needed.

That’s why more and more organizations are now looking to video CMSs that expose developer APIs in order to programmatically consolidate their video assets into one central, secure video library.

Recently, Panopto released a new API with precisely this goal in mind. The video upload API enables any developer using any programming language to write a few lines of code in order to ingest videos from across their network into their Panopto video CMS. Once the content is ingested, Panopto handles the tasks of making the video universally accessible and searchable. Specifically, our video CMS automatically transcodes the videos for playback on any laptop, tablet, or smartphone. And through the use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and optical character recognition (OCR), Panopto indexes every word spoken or shown anywhere in the video, so that people can search across their video library and within individual recordings for any word or phrase.

How easy is the video upload API to use?

Well, today we announced free, fully-functional sample code on our GitHub site that allows any developer to start using the API to ingest videos in less than 10 minutes. Here’s how it works.

First, download the sample code from GitHub:

Second, download and install node.js:

Third, install a few node.js packages – specifically util, path, request, and xml2js:

Finally, run the sample app, specifying your Panopto server, the video file name, the title of your video, username and password, and the target folder ID:

In minutes, your video will be uploaded, transcoded for playback, and indexed for search.

The upload API builds on the existing functionality of our developer platform, which provides an extensive set of interfaces for managing the entire lifecycle of your video:

• Creating live webcasts and on-demand recordings
• Automating and remotely controlling video recordings and live webcasts
• Managing individual recordings within the video library
• Managing collections of videos stored in folders
• Setting up and changing access control to videos and folders
• Administering users and groups
• Integrating Panopto with existing enterprise software and learning management systems
• Accessing detailed analytics for videos, users, and system health
• Searching across the video library and inside individual videos for any word spoken or shown

So if you’re looking to centralize your organization’s videos, and you need an easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use video CMS with the ability to drag-and-drop import your videos, Panopto’s got you covered. And now with the upload API, if you need to programmatically import your video assets into a video CMS, you won’t find an easier-to-use platform than Panopto.

Happy coding!

The post Start Centralizing Your Videos and Making Them Searchable… In Less Than 10 Minutes appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Top executives routinely cite employee development as one of their biggest business challenges. After all, a company’s productivity depends on employees understanding the goals of the company and executing their responsibilities as well as possible.

Yet recent reports from the Savo Group indicate that 35 percent of the knowledge employees gain during training is lost within a single month—and after six months, that number is closer to 90 percent.

Historically companies have looked to ongoing learning and development programs in order to combat this knowledge loss, as well as help employees polish old skills with new ideas and continue to grow and expand capabilities within roles.

Video can be a valuable tool in support of your sales training regimen. Here’s how.

3 Just-In-Time Learning Strategies For Your Sales Team

Skills enhancement via role play. Honing sales skills takes more than philosophical reviews of selling approaches. It takes practice to get familiar with common customer questions and pushback and to be able to steer conversations back on track.

Many sales teams already role play customer scenarios to help team members learn new pitches, prepare for possible difficulties, and keep skills sharp. But unless they are recorded, those practice sessions really only benefit the participants.

From telemarketers to professional athletes, there’s no shortage of evidence that recording and reviewing one’s own performance is a quick and effective way to diagnose issues and identify opportunities for improvement. Recording and sharing these video role-play sessions amongst your team is a great way to help others learn from the experience as well and can help you convey the style and delivery, as well as the substance, of an ideal selling interaction.

Regular product and process updates. While most of your sales enablement practice will highlight new ideas, techniques, and strategies, a smaller but just as important part will be spent ensuring your team can quickly and clearly receive, absorb, and complete standard recurring processes and training.

Especially for more routine or organization-focused objectives like annual reviews, compliance, or ergonomics, it’s critical that your sales team gets the message — quickly.

More compelling than a handbook and more readily available and cost-effective than on-location events and seminars, supplementing your traditional training with available on-demand video is one of the best investments companies make. In fact, new reports suggest transitioning to video e-learning can save your sales team up to 35% of the time it would otherwise be required to spend with in-class training.

How much could you save by
supporting sales training with video?

Calculate Your Savings

Training conference recordings. Events and internal conferences serve a vital purpose. Not only do they allow companies to disseminate relevant information, they can also give employees and others a glimpse of what their peers are working on, what’s new in the industry, and where the company is thinking strategically.

Attending such an event can boost employee morale and engagement in a way that’s almost impossible to replicate during business-as-usual moments. But for oft-cited reasons of timing and budget, attendance is seldom possible for every event and every member of your team.

When attendance isn’t possible, a video recording of the event can be the next best thing. Recording events — or even live-streaming them — can be a great way to share the excitement and insight gleaned from all those keynotes and breakouts, with anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Looking for more ideas to use video for sales enablement?

Download our new white paper for 18 new ideas you can use video to help your sales enablement efforts break through.

Get your free copy today!

The post Enable Just-In-Time Learning with Sales Enablement Training Video appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

“Can you use Panopto to record a document?”

It’s a question we hear quite often — although the noun at the end is almost never the same. Rather, more often we hear “Can you Panopto a Word document? A PDF? Another document tool, like Google Docs, OpenOffice Writer, or Notepad? What about a page on a website? Or printed out the doc and just wanted to use a smartphone to capture our edits on paper?”

The good news is, no matter the document, you can use Panopto to record it.

Panopto’s flexible video platform doesn’t limit you to just presentation slides; if you can show it on a screen, Panopto can capture it, index each word that appears along with every word you speak to make it searchable, and instantly upload it to your centralized video library where you can edit, share, and track whether others actually watched it.

Take a look at just how easy it is to Panopto just about any document you like:

Panopto makes it easy to record virtually any document in just 3 clicks. But that feature itself raises an interesting second question:

Why would you want to record a document in the first place?

Well — many reasons. For organizations around the world, recording a document is becoming a modern convenience and a more efficient way to get work done. Here are just some of the benefits organizations are seeking in recording documents:

More Detailed Document Revision
Before video, reviewing a document was a painstaking task of tracked changes (which still isn’t possible for every document format), coupled with bullet after bullet of written feedback. Every single point had to be perfectly articulated — or risk a misunderstanding that requires yet another round of edits.

Even for simple documents that process can easily take hours — for critical documents like executive communications, press releases, marketing collateral, or anything else destined for public or reference use, it’s now common to go through dozens of rounds of edits from multiple stakeholders. All those written reviews add time, complexity, and confusion.

Video document reviews offer an alternative. The reviewer can use Panopto to record the document on their screen, as well as their onboard laptop webcam to capture their spoken feedback. All together, the recording can show what changes were made, specifically where the reviewer had a question or idea, and how the review would like to see a new version modified — with much less of a chance of miscommunication.

Face-to-Face Reviews — Even at a Distance
In a perfect world, every time a member of your team wanted to walk through a document with a colleague, they’d walk over to that person’s desk and have a quick discussion. But in the modern office, that isn’t always possible — telecommuting and time-shifting, not to mention the possibility of global team members working clear on the other side of the world, have made it harder to connect and discuss a document.

Conferencing and instant-messaging technologies have helped to resolve this difficulty, but they offer no help when two individuals can’t find a common window of time for a call. In a world where colleagues may be working weekends, evenings, or 12 time zones away, you need an on-demand video option to allow those communications to happen.

Panopto makes on-demand communications easy — with one-click recording that is instantly uploaded to be shared on your organization’s video library. Your document reviewer can record on their own schedule, share the link, and allow the viewer to see everything when they sit down at their desk in the morning.

Save Walk-Throughs of Important Documents
Some documents demand more than an email summary. Important files like employee reviews, benefits materials, and other critical information are best shared in-person, with a manager or team leader ready to discuss each element for the employee.

Yet as teams grow larger and organizations spread around the globe, it’s often not possible for every manager to meet with every member of their team face-to-face — even for the important documents. Here too, video can be a valuable tool — offering the manager the chance to record themselves as they walk-through the document to ensure the employee understands what’s written.

Many organizations have even begun using video when the participants in these meetings can meet face-to-face. Video can provide an impartial witness to personnel reviews and can be a valuable teaching tool for helping coach managers as they mentor employees and provide feedback and reviews.

Cover Syllabi and Schedules
Across universities and corporate training departments alike, it’s not uncommon for educators to spend 30- or 60-minutes or more at the beginning of a first class just discussing the materials the class will cover. In an academic environment, this can often take up an entire first day’s worth of classes!

Video again provides a better option. With video, educators can record a quick walkthrough of themselves speaking to the course schedule and share it with their students ahead of class. This is an especially helpful system for teachers in a flipped classroom environment — recording and sharing a syllabus ahead of time can be an easy introduction to participating in a flipped classroom for many students new to the concept.

The Panopto video platform makes it easy for your team to share document reviews anytime and anywhere — for an on-demand audience that can watch on their own schedule from anywhere in the world.

Best of all, Panopto’s Smart Search video search technology makes finding your recorded documents a snap. Panopto automatically indexes every word spoken and every word shown on-screen in every video — so even months from now, your team can quickly find and re-watch your review.

The post Can You Panopto a Document? And Why Would You? appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

The basics of a flipped meeting are simple – share information ahead of time, focus on making decisions in-meeting, and follow up with a summary to keep your team up to date and moving forward. Success requires just a little planning and a commitment to getting the documentation right.

Want to make flipping your meetings even easier? The tool is literally right in front of you—in the form of the webcam in your laptop or smartphone.

Video can be used to support and simplify almost every aspect of a flipped meeting. Two tricks in particular will make your life much easier.

Trick #1: Pre-Meeting Presentation Summary Video

Sharing your meeting materials ahead of time for your team to review is essential to successfully flip your meeting. But—most of us still want that opportunity to present the most essential points.

Here’s where we can go above and beyond with a best practice from flipped classrooms. Recording a quick video summary of your presentation materials—just as a screen capture, or with Panopto to capture your PowerPoint slides and record your presentation—gives you the opportunity to provide a quick executive summary to pair with your materials.

You’ll want to keep your pre-meeting summary video short—aim for 3-5 minutes when preparing a 30-minute meeting, and 5-7 minutes when preparing for an hour or more. As a rule, viewers get distracted or click away after only a few minutes, so you’ll need to put your most important information right up front and make your point quickly.

For your audience, a brief video overview can help familiarize them with your topic, provide a strong point of reference as to the goals of the meeting, and establish you as the driver to keep the meeting moving as it should.

Related Reading: Amazon Doubles Down On Banning Presentations In Meetings

Trick #2: Post-meeting summary/action items

The post-meeting email wrap -identifying new or remaining action items, deliverables, and points of accountability is essential to keeping the work moving. But getting all that from your notes into email takes time.

A better option? A video recap! When your meeting wraps, take just 5 minutes with your laptop or smartphone webcam and record yourself summarizing your discussion and detailing decisions and next steps. And if you’ve used a whiteboard to take notes, you can even capture the details recorded there too.

Once you’ve finished, just upload the video to your enterprise YouTube, share the link with your team, and get back to work. You’ll be surprised just how much time a 5-minute video will save you in place of the standard email write up.

Turn Your Next Meeting On Its Head

The way we do meetings today is broken. Meetings at most organizations are PowerPoint-driven lectures, structured to offer little opportunity to get real work done and real decisions made.

But there is an alternative. The flipped meeting – pioneered by innovative companies like Amazon and LinkedIn, and built on the model of the flipped classroom that has been rolled out in universities across the country and around the world.

The flipped meeting approach is revolutionary in its simplicity:

• Share the informational presentation before the meeting so participants are fully informed up front
• Focus the meeting on making decisions, opening discussion, and getting work done in the meeting, not afterward

This handbook includes a guide to developing a flipped meeting culture in your organization, including:

• Pre-meeting communication and information sharing needs
• In-meeting group management best practices
• Ideas for using video to make flipped meetings more efficient

Flipping your meetings can help you win back time wasted in meetings, ensure that every meeting you attend is productive, and empower your teams to collaboratively make smarter, timelier decisions.

Ready to get more out of your meetings? Download our latest free white paper, “Turn Your Meeting On Its Head: A guide to flipped meetings” today.

The post Make Flipped Meetings Easy With Video appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Panopto has been working with social enterprise Kids’ Health Matters CIC over the past two years to help them expand their use of video for learning. We caught up with Katie Barnes, an Advanced Paediatric Nurse Practitioner (APNP) at the Emergency Department of Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in the UK – and the Founder of Kids’ Health Matters – to find out why they started using video, how it has helped and what her advice would be to other healthcare professionals who want to boost education and training opportunities using video.

Could you give an introduction to Kids’ Health Matters and what some of your learning challenges were?

Kids’ Health Matters (KHM) is a non-profit, social enterprise (otherwise known as a community interest company) that has created an online learning platform called Advance. The Advance platform is aimed at professionals working in nursing, allied health and medicine who want to enhance their knowledge and skills in paediatric and neonatal care.

Advance was created as part of Kids’ Health Matters because I was becoming increasingly aware of an education and training gap that I thought could be filled with some kind of technology-enhanced learning provision. At one end of the learning continuum, many universities offered Advanced Clinical Practice (ACP) Programmes for health professionals, but these frequently had little paediatric or neonatal content. At the other end of the spectrum, there were the paediatric and neonatal National Health Service (NHS) clinicians with phenomenal clinical expertise, but limited opportunities to disseminate their knowledge on a wider scale. I wanted to bridge this gap and so I came up with the idea of creating a shared online educational resource for advanced paediatric and neonatal practice that connected University expertise with NHS expertise – without the challenges imposed by geography or organisational boundaries.  I also wanted to create an educational model that was agile, responsive, clinically relevant and designed for busy lives and packed diaries.

To do this, we decided to develop a range of online modules and resources that could be embedded into existing MSc Advanced Practice programmes (for nurses or allied health professionals) and postgraduate educational programmes (for trainee doctors).  Our collaborative work with Liverpool John Moores University and the North West School of Paediatrics created a more robust paediatric and neonatal workforce and really solidifies the vital link between University programmes and the NHS.  The topics we developed spanned foundational areas such as paediatric physical assessment, history-taking, and pathophysiology right through to more specialised assessment and management of a wide variety of acute and chronic conditions affecting infants, children and young people across a range of healthcare settings.  My idea was to remove barriers created by geography or organisations so that we could:

• Gain economies of scale in paediatric and neonatal workforce development
• Improve the clinical relevance and quality of our advanced education and training
• Create better inter-professional collaboration across organisations

The ultimate goal of all of this, of course, was to improve the care for infants, children and young people.

Tell us how you got started with video learning.

Well, given that a key part of our story at Kids’ Health Matters, Advance centres around flipping the classroom for our learners, I want to flip that question, to first give you a sense of where we ended up. By flipping the question, I can highlight some of the key reasons we chose to use video to enhance our learning offering – namely, the ability to offer on-demand learning resources at scale and irrespective of the location of the learner.

So, the punch line first: with Panopto driving our Advance programme, we have successfully trained 49 Advanced Practitioners in the first two cohorts with another 35 or so starting in September; this means a significant boost for the NHS on the ground.  These learners are spread across ambulatory paediatrics, acute paediatrics and neonatal critical care across the UK – from Northern Ireland to Birmingham (with Cheshire and Merseyside leading the way). Would we have managed to serve such a broad and diverse range of learners without exploiting the advantages of video and online learning? I think that if we hadn’t used video, our goals would have been severely compromised. By taking that initial leap and starting to use a video platform, we have really been able to push the boundaries of what is possible with learning for advanced healthcare education and practice.

As flipped learning has been so central to the Advance programme at KHM, how would you define a flipped classroom?

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, a flipped classroom (or inverted learning model) is a different way of thinking about how (and when) learners direct their own learning, as well as how (and when) tutors help to facilitate and extend learning.

In our interpretation of the flipped classroom model, core course content is shared via video prior to the tutor-facilitated session. This means it can be absorbed by learners at their own pace. Then, what would have been traditional lecture-type delivery becomes a live session and webcast, attended either face-to-face or via a web link. This session can focus on applications of the pre-session content and foster deeper connections. It can also be used for group work or facilitated discussions. Our goal is for our learners to gain a more in-depth understanding of any given topic by exploiting the social power of learning.

Even though the flipped classroom is widely used in higher education, it is still relatively new in healthcare; this article from the GMS Journal for Medical Education provides many useful insights for flipped learning in healthcare.

Why flipped learning for healthcare?

Having flipped my answer to the previous question somewhat, I want to go back to respond to the question of why we became so interested in flipping the classroom. First, we began by thinking at a macro level about how we could design an effective learning process.

According to Bloom’s (Revised) Taxonomy of Cognitive Processes, learners move through various stages during the learning process:

• Remembering and Understanding
• Applying
• Analysing
• Evaluating
• Creating

Given that the learner has these different cognitive processes going on, the question then becomes: how do you best support each element of the learning journey? For us, the ‘Remembering and Understanding’ phase seemed best supported with a more traditional lecture format but with modifications that could also encourage more self-directed learning.  The ‘Applying’, ‘Analysing’, ‘Evaluating’ and ‘Creating’ phases were where we wanted the educational ‘zing’ of facilitated case-based discussions, led by senior clinicians. This would enable all that ‘Remembering and Understanding’ to be put into a practical context of clinical decision-making in paediatrics and neonatology.

As we became more knowledgeable about various learning methodologies, we felt that the flipped classroom model created a more exciting, relevant way of approaching the type of clinical content and application we needed for our developing workforce in advanced paediatrics and neonatology.

We have now flipped all of our ‘classrooms’ in all of our paediatric clinical modules. We also made all our so-called ‘upside down’ teaching accessible to our trainees across all three pathways – ambulatory paediatrics, acute paediatrics and neonatal critical care. Both our on-demand flipped sessions and our live, case-based sessions were powered by Panopto and it was so useful to have just one platform that could do everything we wanted. In truth, none of this would have been possible without our ability to record, webcast, and post the educational content created using Panopto.    

Tell us about your ‘scheduled’ and ‘flexible’ video content.

To make the flipped idea easier for our learners to understand, we called the flipped video sessions ‘flexible content’ (because it was available online 24/7) and the live webcasts of case-based discussions the ‘scheduled content’ (because it had specific start and finish times.) We didn’t want the learners to be focused on the learning methodology we’d chosen, but on the content and the learning process. We felt that the terms ‘flexible’ and ‘scheduled’ really encapsulated the way we wanted them to think about our complementary delivery methods.   

The flexible content was usually a recording of me (or another of our clinical experts) guiding our trainees through the foundations of a given topic with integrated video, audio and a PowerPoint slide deck. While I know some people are worried about appearing on camera, my advice to them would be – just go for it. If staff are really unhappy with the idea of appearing on camera, the option is always there to record without the video component. However, I’m a big advocate of using video as part of the recordings as I really believe that having a talking head of a tutor or instructor alongside slides or screen capture enhances the overall engagement for learners. Having worked in paediatrics for decades and knowing that from our earliest moments as babies we are programmed to respond to human faces above all else, it makes perfect sense to me that having a video of a tutor talking alongside other learning materials helps improve learner engagement. This has been noted in some studies with students in higher education too.

For the scheduled (webcast) content, we set up a camera to capture the live discussion with our clinical experts, our KHM faculty and trainees that are able to attend face-to-face.  Distance learners log into the live broadcast and ask questions of their own, using Panopto’s live discussion feature. This really helps to bring the cohort together and gives all trainees an opportunity to participate and engage.  It was crucially important that our distance learners felt as engaged as our face-to-face learners during the scheduled sessions.

What did your learners think of your flipped learning approach for healthcare?

We recently had an independent organisation evaluate the work we did on implementing this flipped approach and they found that our learners had generally extremely positive perspectives on this new mode of learning, as well as on our blended learning provision. In the report, the evaluator commented that:

“Trainees were very positive about the flipped classroom, and the experience of blended learning. For trainees in employment with busy family lives, the accessibility of the specialist modules promotes learning, as it is a convenient way to study. Moreover, it affords trainees the opportunity to understand how they learn better, by understanding their ‘saturation’ point, as well as developing self-organising and time management skills.”

This has encouraged us to carry on with this way of structuring our modules and learning resources so that we continue to provide clinically relevant, accessible and flexible advanced practice education.

Do you have any words of advice for anyone in healthcare new to video for learning?

I think the results we’ve seen so far speak for themselves – video can help you provide compelling, engaging learning materials that students can access at the point of need, even if they have professional or family commitments. I think this can only drive up the quality of education in advanced healthcare practice.  So what would I say to my fellow healthcare professionals? I have three thoughts to help you get started:

1. Be brave. It can be daunting to try something new, but the benefits are often huge. Remember, you can always course-correct along the way, even if things aren’t 100% right the first time around.
2. Seek feedback from your learners. When you implement a blended or flipped learning approach, it’s important to sense-check the views of your learners along the way. For instance, we realised that we needed to release flipped material potentially a little earlier than we originally planned so that our trainees felt confident they had enough time to absorb and direct their uptake of the flexible content. By staying in touch with the needs of your learners you can make sure you provide them with the best possible learning experience.
3. Just try flipped learning. We have seen such a great impact on our delivery – I really think it could be a great way for many healthcare professionals to share expertise more effectively.

Learn more about using video for healthcare >>

The post Why Flipped Learning Works For Healthcare Education appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Adopting a new approach to teaching is never easy.

Flipping the classroom asks educators to change their approach to lectures and classroom time, and requires buy-in both from students and administration in order to take root and succeed.

These challenges are well-documented — and educators at the forefront of the flipped classroom movement have already uncovered many potential answers.

We’ve written extensively on the latest developments in classroom flipping — you can find some of our latest reports on the thought behind the strategy on our website, including:

• Which Flipped Classroom is Right For You? An introduction to the latest trends, strategies, and ideas in classroom flipping, including the 3 key parts of every flipped classroom.
• Get Flipped: Advice for Flipped Classroom Beginners. A quick review of the most essential considerations for teachers getting ready to flip their first class.
• Ready, Set, Go! How To Make Your Flipped Classroom Work. Ideas for helping your students prepare for learning in a flipped classroom environment.
• 7 Unique Flipped Classroom Models — Which is Right for You? A deeper look into some of the unique models of how a teacher can invert a class.
• Best-In-Class – Inspiration for Your Flipped Classroom. Three great examples of classroom flipping that’s going on right now using Panopto.
• How Can I Convince My Colleagues that Flipping the Classroom Is a Good Idea? A look at some of the most common reasons and goals for inverted classrooms, to help you make the case that flipping will be right for your colleagues.

Beyond these conceptual challenges, however, there is another equally vexing hurdle that catches many first-time flippers off guard:

Flipped classroom technology.

Flipping calls on educators to share lecture materials in advance for student review. Practically speaking, for the majority of flipped classrooms, this means creating some form of short video lecture — sometimes called a “microlecture”— that may be composed of a screen recording of slides, a webcam-recording of the teacher, video of a demonstration, or some combination of the three — and then sharing the resulting recording in a way that makes it easily available for students.

Watch an example flipped classroom video recorded with Panopto below:

As the inverted classroom’s early adopters have discovered, that simple mandate can add up to all kinds of technical issues. And without a system or a plan in place to manage them, those issues can quickly derail even the most enthusiastic flipper.

5 Key Technical Considerations Educators Need To Manage When Setting Up A Flipped Classroom

While every institution’s needs are different, we’ve found five big categories of technical difficulties that schools and universities should prepare for when planning to flip:

1. Consistent, accessible, secure video storage
   Too many schools fail to plan for where to save their video content, and how to make that content available to students. Video files can be large, and without some planning, they may consume a significant amount of network space and bandwidth capacity. Some educators attempt to work around this problem by using public YouTube pages or file sharing services like DropBox. This, however, can create a disjointed experience for students, and may also pose problems for data security or copyright issues.
2. Support for recording video from any location
   Hardware-based solutions designed to be installed in a classroom for capturing lectures simply don’t cut it for flipped classrooms. Flipped classrooms need to be flexible and enable teachers to record any kind of video, from anywhere, at any time.
3. The ability to capture anything and everything in a single video
   Great teachers know that the classroom exists everywhere. Whether it’s experiments in the lab, out “in the field” conducting remote demonstrations, or simply sharing one more concept from a home office, instructors need the ability to record video from anywhere.
4. Watching videos anytime, anywhere, on any device
   A professor’s flipped classroom lectures may be worthy of an Academy Award, but they’d be all for naught if students can’t actually watch them due to file formatting issues. This is a problem that gets more complicated with every new recording device and every new viewing platform — if students aren’t able to watch a video on the devices they have (and that’s no given: as just one example, Apple’s iPhones and iPads famously don’t support Flash video), they won’t be prepared when they get to class.
5. Searching video files for specific content
   Nothing builds up an extensive video library quite like regularly recording classroom lectures — most flipped classrooms record dozens or even hundreds of hours over the course of a semester. But video is notoriously difficult to search, meaning that as finals draw close and students start studying, they’ll be left with few options for finding the exact content they want to review.

Failing to account for any of these challenges can limit your success with the flipped classroom. Fortunately, early adopters are already uncovering best practices to answering each of these questions.

Get The Flipped Classroom eBook

Take a deeper look into the flipped classroom evolution, including the foundational strategy and early results that have so many teachers excited, in our latest white paper, So You’ve Decided To Flip Your Classroom.

In it, we discuss the five most important technologies schools should consider when researching or implementing the flipped classroom, including:

• How to make videos easily available, consistently and securely
• How to enable teachers to record video in any location
• Ensuring instructors can record anything, no matter how complex
• Ensuring students can watch videos anytime, anywhere, on any device
• Ensuring students can find any topic in any video when needed

Download your free copy today!

The post What Are the Common Technical Challenges to Flipping A Classroom? appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

In the age of YouTube, the almighty video tutorial has become the go-to way to learn how to do just about anything — how to use excel, how to edit a pdf, how to learn to code, and thousands of other examples.

Today’s knowledge workers expect to be able to find information and learn new skills quickly in order to solve problems and adapt to an ever-changing world. And today, nearly half of all employees turn to YouTube videos at least once a week to find work-related information or to learn how to do something specific or solve a particular problem.

Yet while YouTube may have a lot of answers, most businesses should recognize that trend as a real potential threat.

Because in all likelihood, a better answer to a work-related question already exists within your organization, as part of the institutional knowledge or subject matter expertise of one of your other employees. Rare will be the YouTube clip that would do a better job informing your employees than one of their own colleagues.

That said, productivity is all about time. And that means the million-dollar question is, can your institutional knowledge be accessed as quickly and easily as performing a search on YouTube?

For most organizations, the answer to that question is, unfortunately, no.

A recent survey conducted by Panopto and YouGov revealed that, on average, employees waste 5 hours a week just waiting to get some bit of knowledge from a coworker who can’t be reached, or blindly forging ahead to try and find that knowledge elsewhere. For larger companies, that translates into about $3 million in productivity lost each year for every 1,000 employees on your team.

This is precisely the reason that more and more organizations are getting increasingly proactive when it comes to sharing knowledge.

So how are they doing it?

Scaling Social Learning With Employee-Generated Video Tutorials

One strategy that’s emerged is embracing scalable social learning with video. By enabling employees the power to quickly record and capture ad hoc knowledge, process explainers, walkthroughs, and more as video tutorials, businesses can make it ridiculously fast and easy for anyone within the organization to share their knowledge with everyone else in the company.

Not only is capturing a video tutorial faster than writing out a detailed process document or email, but video is a better medium for teaching colleagues something new. Video tutorials are easier to follow along with than a dense manual or other text-based documentation and offer employees greater control over their learning with the ability to rewind and replay the video on-demand.

Further, research shows employees simply prefer to learn by watching a video. A recent Wainhouse Research study showed that 90 percent of employees believe streaming video is an effective tool for communicating work-related information. They believe video learning can improve knowledge sharing at work better than traditional training and communications tools alone. And 75 percent of employees say they are more likely to watch a video than read text documents, emails or web articles.

Of course, while anyone with a smartphone can record a video tutorial on, say, applying makeup, or unclogging a drain, and then upload it for all to see on YouTube, most businesses have yet to find a similar solution that can help make recording and securely sharing video tutorials at work comparably easy.

That’s often because there are actually two solutions businesses need to create their own internal YouTube that’s full of useful employee-generated how-to videos: video capture software and a video content management system. And both can be found in an enterprise video platform like Panopto.

The Best Software For Recording and Sharing Video Tutorials

For businesses looking to scale social learning and knowledge sharing with video, Panopto’s video capture software, designed specifically for recording engaging video tutorials, can be a flywheel for internal knowledge sharing. Panopto is easy to set up and use, has flexible multimedia recording capabilities, and includes the ability to edit videos.

Here are a few of the specific video capture software capabilities you’ll find in Panopto:

• Simple setup to capture recordings on any laptop, tablet, or smartphone
• The ability to record multiple screens and record from multiple cameras
• The ability to capture audio and video from the presenter alongside other video feeds, such as screen shares or PowerPoint slides
• Basic video editing tools that make recordings easy to polish prior to sharing

Watch a video tutorial recorded with Panopto:

Recording institutional knowledge in video tutorials is only half the battle, though.

How do employees find an existing video tutorial? And can they stream it as easily as they would a video on YouTube?

Why You Also Need Your Own “Corporate YouTube” For Sharing Video Tutorials

Panopto not only makes it easy for anyone to record video tutorials but also solves the challenges most businesses face when it comes to hosting, sharing and searching video-based knowledge.

Panopto includes a robust video content management system, which is your company’s own private and secure YouTube, or “corporate YouTube.” This means that after someone records a video tutorial,  the video is automatically processed and uploaded to a secure, central video library where it can be easily discovered and watched.

Here are a few reasons why a corporate YouTube is so essential, and why it’s included with Panopto’s video capture software:

It Keeps Internal Videos Secure

There’s a reason you wouldn’t use YouTube to host your internal video tutorials — you don’t want the institutional knowledge that gives your business a strategic advantage going public. While you can share videos privately on YouTube, for most businesses, it simply isn’t secure enough.

Panopto’s YouTube-like video content management system keeps all of your videos secure, giving you complete ownership of the content and putting you in total control of how your internal videos are shared.

Employees Can Search And Find Answers In Videos Immediately

If something is worth recording, it’s worth finding. If no one can locate the video tutorials your employees are recording because they’re scattered in various places across your network or because the content inside them isn’t searchable, then creating those videos in the first place will be of limited value to your organization.

That’s why Panopto includes the industry’s most comprehensive video search engine, Smart Search. Every video uploaded to your Panopto video library is automatically indexed for search, enabling everyone in your organization to find not only the videos that answer their questions but also the exact moment in a video that a topic is mentioned. Whether a video was recorded with Panopto, with your video conferencing software, or another method, Panopto makes every word spoken and shown in the video searchable.

Watch Panopto’s video search engine in action:

It Does All The Work To Make Video Streaming Seamless

If you’ve tried to share videos within your organization in the past, you’ve almost certainly experienced the difficulty of ensuring that recordings can be played on every device and with minimal buffering, without over-taxing your corporate network. Managing and maintaining a corporate video library the traditional way often requires dozens of steps, and requires the involvement of multiple people and technologies. This tends to make supporting video complicated and expensive.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. A corporate YouTube does everything for you. File formatting, streaming optimization, and even device-aware playback are all taken care of automatically, with no need for complicated processing or expensive specialists. And the end result is, your employees can stream work-related videos just as easily as they would a YouTube video.

Sure, there is free screen capture software that employees can use to create video tutorials at work, but ask yourself if those tools will go far enough to help you solve the bigger problem — sharing knowledge efficiently throughout your entire company — before settling for the most basic solution.

The 5 Biggest Challenges To Training With Video

For most organizations, creating and managing training videos — whether they are formal training videos produced by L&D professionals or informal employee-created video tutorials —  requires a complex map of disconnected systems and software. But it is expensive and inefficient to manage video this way.

An end-to-end enterprise video platform like Panopto that includes both video capture software and a video content management system will ultimately provide a better, more flexible, and more cost-effective solution for any business looking to improve productivity through scalable social learning.

Read about how a video platform solves the top 5 challenges to training with video in our latest white paper.

Download The White Paper >>

The post The Best Software For Recording Video Tutorials At Work appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Greatness, it is said, is not merely achieving excellence, but in achieving excellence consistently.

Ask any HR team and they’ll tell you — consistency is the key to cultivating great workplace cultures and developing the employee skills needed to help an organization achieve its own greatness.

Consistency in communicating values. Consistency in providing training. Consistency in setting expectations. Consistency in managing performance.

So why then are so many organizations so inconsistent right from the start?

New employee onboarding is the name most commonly given to the process of welcoming a new hire and getting them up to speed on their role and the company.

New employee onboarding is the first opportunity an organization has to build foundational knowledge with their new hires — everything from functional questions like how to use internal systems and sign up for benefits packages to matters of greater importance: organizational values, standards of performance, and what defines success. Altogether, it’s the information every member of your team needs in order to do the best work.

New hires, too, have come to depend on effective onboarding — and feel lost without it. According to a survey of employees who had quit a job within six months of starting:

• 23 percent felt they hadn’t received clear guidelines for their new responsibilities
• 21 percent said they wanted “more effective training”

Yet with so much to be gained — or lost — many organizations still don’t make onboarding a priority.

Instead of standardizing an onboarding program that can ensure all that essential information is delivered consistently, companies put their faith in the hiring manager to conduct this essential learning and development task. Sometimes this means new hires get a lengthy, detailed, 90-day onboarding plan. Sometimes, this means new hires get a cup of coffee and a rundown on what their new team works on. And sometimes, this means new hires are simply assigned a task and left to learn the ropes on their own.

It’s a problem that is only exaggerated when organizations expand.

For larger organizations, or those with geographically dispersed offices, storefronts, or sales territories, relying on local managers for new employee onboarding increases the likelihood that your new employee experience will be different for every new hire — and that over time, every physical location will develop its own individual workplace culture, and not necessarily consistent with the values and measures practiced in the corporate headquarters.

What’s the secret to simple, scalable, consistent new employee onboarding?

Video.

With video, your learning and development team can record everything new recruits need to know — and share that information in a standard, consistent fashion. HR teams can even make use of the organization’s central video library to build playlists of videos for new hires to access and play anytime anywhere — so even those new employees coming into offices across the country or around the world will start with exactly the same foundational information as their peers at HQ.

Best of all, video for new employee onboarding can be easy. Just record the onboarding training already available! Just by recording those sessions you make the information shareable — and in turn, you help the whole onboarding process become more consistent.

Need an example?

Leveraging video training creates a portable, consistent learning experience for every employee — and ensures that each team member receives that critical information in the same way, regardless of who conducts the training.

Video onboarding doesn’t have to be limited to the basics, either. HR teams can even work directly with hiring managers in front-lines or high-turnover teams to capture the essentials of what new employees need to know — ensuring that every new team member learns everything they should, even if the corporate training team can’t deliver the information in person.

Make Every First Day A Great One

Learn how to enhance new employee onboarding with video — with a simple guide to creating an onboarding program that works — in our complete guide to new employee onboarding with video, 15 Ways To Enhance Employee Onboarding With Video.

Download your free copy today!

The post One Simple Secret to Consistent Employee Onboarding appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

You’ve prepared an awesome slide deck, you’ve rehearsed your speaking points, and your video presentation software is queued up and ready to go.

But are you ready to be on camera?

Adding presenter video to your online presentation or live webcast creates a more engaging experience for both you and your viewers. Fortunately, looking your best while on camera doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. We’ve got a few easy tips that you can follow to make sure that your video is as polished as you are.

1. Place your camera at just slightly above eye level

Making eye contact with your audience is important, even for online presentations. Making eye contact will help your viewers connect with you as a speaker. As you deliver your presentation, you’ll want to look into the camera as if you’re speaking directly to a colleague. To make this easier, place your camera at eye-level. If you’re using your webcam, try stacking a few books or paper reams underneath your computer to get that extra height.

Not only will positioning your camera at just slightly above eye-level make it feel more natural for you to look into the camera, but it’s also more flattering. In contrast, most people’s laptop webcams are situated at too low of an angle, resulting in video that’s shot from the chin up. Unless you’re hoping to show off an extra chin or the inside of your nostrils, you’re better off raising up your camera a few inches.

2. Optimize your lighting

Lighting is one of the easiest ways to improve a webcam presentation. Although there are several products on the market that we like, you could easily use lighting sources that you already have in your home or office.

A window provides the most natural light. However, you don’t want the window (or any light source) behind you in your shot, because it can cast unnatural shadows on your face or create a silhouette effect. This is called backlighting and results in your face being dimly lit. If you need to have a window in your background, draw the blinds and use an additional light source in front of you to ensure your face is adequately lit.

Experiment with different ways of lighting yourself to create a clear and natural image.

3. Mind your back(ground)

Remember that your audience will be able to see what’s behind you, so pay attention to the other objects that are in your camera’s field of view. An undecorated, solid-colored background is your best bet to ensure that your audience stays focused on you. Also, keep a bit of distance between you and your background – if you sit too close, the lighting can cast an unpleasant shadow onto the backdrop. Finally, remove any clutter and unnecessary items from your desk that may be distracting to your viewers.

4. Relax!

You’ll want to be as relaxed and natural on camera as possible. One trick that we use to help our bodies become relaxed before a presentation is called “progressive muscle relaxation.” First take a deep breath, then tense up all the muscles in your body, including scrunching up your facial muscles. Hold that tension for a moment, then release the tension while exhaling. It may look silly, but it works!

The post 4 Simple Online Video Presentation Tips appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Designing employee training materials is no small challenge.

Getting the content right is of course critical. Every detail needs to be correct (and shown in the correct order), or risk steering learners the wrong way. And while the material covered may be second nature to your subject matter expert, that’s often not the case for your instructional designer — and that disconnect all too often results in essential information getting overlooked.

Likewise, managing the delivery of the information is essential. Does the material require a classroom session with a live teacher, or will a memo or guide suffice? Does every member of an organization need to complete the training, or just a select few? And does the team need to ensure the training is completed, or is simply making the material available enough? Getting any of those questions wrong can create headaches — and potentially real financial liabilities — for you, your employees, and your entire company.

Along with message and the medium, employee training teams are increasingly finding that, to ensure their work achieves its desired outcome, their materials must be designed with their audience in mind.

As organizations work to bridge employee skills gaps, introduce new tools and processes, and best leverage their institutional knowledge, formal and informal training is becoming a more common part of most employees’ regular schedules. Designing ongoing learning activities to fit into their already busy days requires some level of skill — and a solid respect for cognitive load theory.

The Fundamentals of Cognitive Load Theory in Learning

Cognitive Load Theory first came to prominence thanks to the work of John Sweller, whose research found that people (at every age) had a maximum capacity for the mental effort they could exert while learning — their “cognitive load.” Tasking individuals to take in information in greater amounts or more quickly than this personal learning threshold results in “overload” — effectively meaning that person’s working memory can no longer keep up, and will fail to effectively absorb or retain much of what’s shared.

The complete science behind the findings is truly fascinating, and Sweller’s book is well worth a read for anyone interested in the human psychology of learning.

What Training Professionals Need to Know About Cognitive Load Theory

What makes cognitive load theory important to learning and development professionals is that unlike other human biases that can only be accounted for, cognitive load is something that trainers can explicitly design their materials to solve.

Sweller’s theory posits that everyone exhibits three types of cognitive loads:

• Intrinsic — the sheer challenge of the subject matter. The more difficult the subject, the more likely they are to overwhelm the learner. Rocket science and brain surgery are the quintessential examples of high-intrinsic cognitive load concepts.
• Extraneous — any element of the training materials that is nonessential to delivering the information. Often, this consists of additional information included for depth or completeness, but that require learners to spend extra energy to process without adding much value to the final lesson.
• Germane — the actual mental energy you want your students to apply. These are all the efforts learners will take in order to understand and retain the lesson.

For training professionals, cognitive load theory provides a simple guide to creating more successful training materials — minimize the extraneous loads created in your materials in order to enable learners to maximize their own germane cognitive load potential with respect to the intrinsic load of the subject matter.

In other words, design training to remove as many hurdles to learning as possible, so people can learn as much as possible given the complexity of the content.

Video Helps Both Scale Training Efforts and Reduce Cognitive Overload In Course Design

Video has been winning rapid adoption in organizations large and small as an efficient means to scale employee training activities and do more in an era of stagnant HR and Learning and Development budgets.

IOMA suggests that on average, corporations can save between 50% and 70% when they shift classroom-based training to eLearning, and the individual case studies are even more compelling. Ernst and Young reduced its costs by 35% and reduced its training time by about 52% by investing in eLearning. Dow Chemical reduced its training costs to just $11 per learner with online training, down from $95 per learner with traditional classrooms. And Microsoft has reported that a move to video-based training has helped the organization reduce costs by $303 per person, from $320 to just $17.

How much could you save
with video-based e-learning?
Calculate Your Savings

But not only does video help reduce costs and make sharing training on-demand anytime anywhere possible, video-enabled training can also help organizations to minimize the extraneous cognitive loads created by traditional instructional materials and better optimize their employees’ abilities to focus on the subject at hand.

The versatility and flexibility of video as a teaching tool helps put employees in control of their learning experiences, naturally reducing some of the external distractions that can derail otherwise excellent materials.

With a more engaging format that takes advantage of the 90% of human communication that’s nonverbal, video does more to draw in the learner than text alone. And because video can be watched and rewatched anytime on-demand, employees can choose when the lesson will best fit into their schedule — improving focus by minimizing the likelihood of disruption.

Related Reading: When There Isn’t Time For Learning, You Learn “In The Flow Of Work”

Even complex and sensitive training materials can be easily taught — and learned — with video-based training. Watch an example video below:

4 Tips for Producing Training Videos that Will Best Manage Cognitive Load

While video-based training may naturally help assuage several issues that create cognitive load problems, there are many techniques your employee training team can put to work to ensure every recorded lesson performs best.

Present information in different ways
Video already creates an opportunity here, by enabling you to share webcam video, slides, screen recordings, and just about anything else. Take advantage of this flexibility, and be sure that any materials you record do so as well — integrating images, charts, animations, and curated video to supplement your text. Integrating everything together helps learners absorb your content using whichever mental processing method works best for them.

Concise beats comprehensive
There’s always the temptation to include every last detail and every minor note — especially when you’re working with multiple stakeholders. Trainers need to own the final product and it’s ability to really teach — and eliminating extraneous information (as well as intentional redundancy) eliminates the need for learners to attempt to process and sort out all those extra points.

One objective per recording
While your instructor-led classroom sessions may run 4-8 hours (or more), self-directed eLearning tends to work better in smaller steps. Divide your materials — even if just by breaking up one long recording — into smaller lessons, and encourage learners to move from one to the next only when they’ve fully grasped the first. This is another area where video-based teaching can be exceptionally beneficial — with video, there’s no limit to how often an employee can rewind and rewatch a lesson should they need.

Use search to your advantage
While there is much you can do to optimize your training materials for memorability, simple experience tells us your employees will still eventually forget a considerable chunk of what you’ve taught. In the past, this would have meant your team would need to hold endless “refresher” sessions or field one-off emails answering frequently asked questions. No more. A modern video platform can help make the content in your videos easy for employees to search as needed. For Panopto customers, Panopto’s Smart Search technology automatically indexes every word spoken or shown in every video in your video library, enabling anyone in the organization to instantly find and fast-forward to the relevant information they need, whenever they need it.

Related Reading: How To Make Engaging Training Videos For Employees

Make Sure Your Team Has the Right Tool to Create Training Materials that Are Optimized for Cognitive Load Balance

Panopto’s flexible video platform makes it easy to record, manage, and share just about any kind of video presentation, live and on-demand with any audience. To see Panopto in action — or to give Panopto a try in your organization — contact our team today.

The post Employee Training That Scales — And Respects Cognitive Load Theory appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

It’s official: flipped classrooms are now the new normal.

In the decade since the first flipped classroom made its debut, the number of teachers already flipping or planning to flip continues to grow at breakneck pace. By next year, more than half of all teachers will have flipped a course. The New Media Consortium has even hailed the flipped classroom as one of the most important developments in educational technology for higher education.

As flipped classrooms become increasingly commonplace across campuses worldwide, many schools and universities are finding themselves challenged to identify the best ways to support faculty members making the flip. After all, faculty needs can vary widely depending on teachers’ experience and comfort level with flipped classrooms. Early on, faculty may need only simple advice and support as they begin to navigate the new technology and learn how best to adapt their course material. As instructors gain more experience with the pedagogy, they may look for more efficient ways to produce and scale their efforts, or seek out feedback from other flipped instructors on new ideas and approaches.

Many of the format’s earliest adopters have found that, while the specific format and objectives of each flipped classroom will vary, on the whole, faculty experience greater success in flipping their individual classes when their institution creates an internal community that can offer collective support every flipped classroom instructor. For institutions looking for proven ways to enhance the way they support flipped classrooms on campus, Campus Technology has detailed how three top universities are leading the way in their support for flipped classroom faculty.

University of Pennsylvania

At the University of Pennsylvania’s Structured, Active, In-Class Learning Program (SAIL), a holistic approach is taken to nurture the growth of flipped classes on campus. Faculty interested in flipping their courses have the opportunity to observe their colleagues’ flipped classes and then attend monthly seminars to discuss any challenges they’re experiencing. SAIL participants are also able to apply for course development grants to help create their flipped courses. And for professors already flipping their classes, SAIL offers the ability to sign up for specially-designated active learning classrooms that feature multiple screens and round tables to facilitate discussion.

University of Washington

The University of Washington also takes a collaborative approach in their active learning initiatives. Five learning communities were created, and facilitator-led meetings were held on a bi-weekly basis to discuss and collaborate on flipped classroom topics. The communities brought together professors from different discipline, with each distinct community setting their own agenda. According to Beth Kalikoff, director of the University of Washington’s Center for Teaching and Learning, faculty who participated in these communities continue to iterate and improve on their flipped classrooms — without returning to traditional lectures.

Duke University

At Duke University, faculty fellowships have helped support the use of new technology and new teaching methods for the past 15 years. And in response to growing interest in flipped teaching, the university created a Flipping the Classroom Faculty Fellowship where participants could sit in on flipped classes and share their observations. Most interestingly, the fellowship meetings were held in a flipped class format, enabling faculty members to experience the environment for themselves and become more comfortable with the pedagogical style.

Interested in Flipping Classes at Your Academic Institution?

If you’re looking to expand flipped teaching at your school or university, download our comprehensive guide, The Practical Guide to Flipping Your Classroom. In it, we cover everything from the questions you’ll encounter when flipping the classroom, to how to plan for active learning sessions, and even what to look for in video equipment.

And if you’re looking to improve the way you record lectures, flipped classroom content, campus events, and more, check out Panopto’s video platform for education. With Panopto, you can record from any PC or Mac, and every recording is automatically uploaded and formatted for optimal playback on any device. The system also integrates with most popular LMS solutions to ensure that your students have easy access to recordings. Panopto even indexes every word spoken or shown in your videos, enabling your students to keyword search and instantly fast-forward to the information they need.

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Panopto /pə-näp’-tō/

Ask anyone who’s founded a business – if you’re going to hang out your shingle, it helps to have a name to put on it. So — why “Panopto”?

Panopto derives from panoptic, “the point at which everything can be seen in one view.” Panoptic in turn comes directly from the Greek word panoptos, “seen by all”.

In video, the panoptic view is the one that allows the viewer to see everything at once.

Our mission at Panopto is to democratize knowledge sharing with video. We believe that video has the power to fundamentally improve the way organizations communicate and the way students learn. So our software enables anyone to record and share video presentations that make the viewer feel like they’re actually there.

Students watching a college lecture can see the professor, their slides, and the whiteboard in a single view. Medical professionals watching a recorded surgery can see every step performed from multiple camera angles. Employees watching a town hall event from around the world can see the CEO, their PowerPoint slides, and product demonstrations as though they were sitting in the conference room. With Panopto, any idea – big or small – can be easily recorded, shared, and watched from any device.

Our video platform also enables people to see inside video in ways never before possible. We’ve built a unique video search engine that indexes the actual content within videos. This enables employees and students to find and fast-forward to any word spoken or shown within any video ever recorded. And for the first time, it enables businesses and academic institutions to build searchable video libraries of their institutional knowledge.

At Panopto, we’re building software that allows video to be used as a universal tool for learning and communication – making it easier to capture video from any angle, to watch video from any device, and to search inside video as easily as we search the web today.

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