Microlearning Mistakes: How to Make a Training Video that Cures Insomnia

Many people have trouble sleeping. Follow these production tips and your training video can give these unfortunates the relief they seek!

• Make it long. This isn’t hard. Any training video longer than two minutes will probably do the trick.
• Use a lot of talking heads. Professorial types with bushy eyebrows that go up and down when they talk are golden.
• Include extraneous content. Make the intro long and self-serving, go off on tangents, and belabor the main points. Easy peasy.
• Avoid text. Never, ever display keywords or use concise phrases to tie ideas together or summarize takeaways.
• Chop chop … NOT. Cool it with all the editing. Real people stumbling around trying to explain something is so painful to watch that sleep will be an automatic defense mechanism.

Remember, your job is not to foster learning or deliver a message. Your job is to help these poor folks catch a few winks.  A poorly designed and produced training video is just the ticket!

Next time: How to Utterly Defile a Microlearning Video

Rick Lamb is a writer, educator, and media producer who specializes in microlearning video. He makes none of these mistakes.