What Is the Importance of Video Tutorials to Students?
Whether you are training employees or teaching school-age students, you want them to retain as much of the information you present as possible. Some people are more visual learners and benefit from seeing demonstrations, while others are more audio-centric and learn better with verbal explanations.
Video tutorials, whether recorded or live, are important to students because they add another dimension to learning that makes a student's educational experience more effective, helping with retention, explains video training solutions provider Panopto.
The videos allow a classroom setting to come to life, offering different perspectives and tools that students might not normally be able to take advantage of in their learning. This improves student engagement, according to Water Bear Learning.
It Helps With Distance Learning
Video tutorials can be viewed on computers through websites, using DVDs and online streams, as well as with other mobile devices, such as smartphones. They provide accessibility to those with disabilities who are not able to physically be present in a live classroom. Mothers of young children can learn from home while still attending to their children.
The importance of video lessons includes the ability of adult students and parents of students to save on transportation costs and commuting time. It also allows students who were unable to attend class at their school or college due to illness or vacation to catch up on missed lessons from any location.
Video tutorials also allow students to access lessons from instructors who are well-known as specialists in their fields, but otherwise inaccessible to students due to distance, such as professors in foreign countries. These professors on video might add another dimension to the students' learning in those fields that their local schools cannot provide.
It Allows for Repetition
The ability to pause, rewind, stop and play a recorded video tutorial from a DVD or online helps students replay important points that they need to remember, which is essential for memory retention in preparation for exams. In a live classroom, it's easy to miss what the instructor says at any given moment, but with a video tutorial, notes can be rechecked for accuracy. A lesson in video format allows students to focus in on specific segments, as well as play the information in its entirety.
It Provides Variety
Video tutorials offer a multidimensional experience that may combine charts, slides, photos, graphics, narration, screenshots, on-screen captions, music and live video. This allows students with different learning abilities to retain information in a method more suited to them.
The more that tools are utilized in a video tutorial, the more ways a student has to focus on, comprehend and retain the information. Many of these multimedia aids might be too complex or time-consuming to regularly utilize in a physical classroom environment.
It Encourages Interactivity
Video tutorials that allow for interaction, such as computer software lessons, provide a "hands-on" approach that can help reinforce the information. Instead of just hearing or seeing the information, the student can respond to prompts using a keyboard and mouse to answer questions or access extra learning features.
Videos might also be accompanied by documents that can be downloaded with outlines of the video lesson or notes with blanks for students to type in as they watch the video tutorial. By using these interactive features, students may benefit by being introduced to new technologies.
Another type of interactivity involves two-way communication that can take place between students and a video teacher if the video is transmitted live online, even though they are in different physical locations -- through webcams, microphones and chat software.