Why video alone isn't enough for training, and how interactive learning helps people remember

Before we built Veurone Studio, we made training videos for companies. I still like video. It's a good way to show a process, a product or a place.

But a video on its own asks very little of the person watching. You press play, and you sit back. In this post I'll go through what the research says about that, and what we built because of it.

Video helps when it's part of a lesson

In 2021, Michael Noetel and his colleagues reviewed 105 randomised trials of video in university teaching, with 7,776 students in all.^[1]

When video replaced other teaching, students learned a little more. When video was added to other teaching, students learned a lot more.

So video works well as one part of a lesson. The trouble starts when the video is the whole lesson.

Attention drops off fast

Philip Guo, Juho Kim and Rob Rubin looked at 6.9 million viewing sessions across four edX courses.^[2] The median time people spent on a video was six minutes or less, however long the video was.

Those were university courses, not workplace training. But it's worth keeping in mind before you make a 30-minute compliance video.

Michelene Chi and Ruth Wylie at Arizona State University sort what learners do into four modes: passive, active, constructive and interactive.^[3] In their framework, watching a video without doing anything else is passive. They predict that learning goes up at each step, from passive to interactive.

People remember what they pull back out of memory

In 2006, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke gave students short passages to learn.^[4] Then some students read the passage again. Others wrote down everything they could remember.

Five minutes later, the students who reread did better, 81% to 75%. A week later, the results flipped. The students who had tested themselves recalled 56%. The students who reread recalled 42%.

I think the same thing happens when people rewatch a training video. It feels like learning on the day. At work, the week after is what counts.

This is called the testing effect. Olusola Adesope and his team at Washington State University pooled the research on it in 2017.^[5] Practice tests helped learning more than restudying, and more than every other condition they were compared with.

Questions inside the video keep people with you

If you've ever tuned out halfway through a recorded webinar, this study will feel familiar. Karl Szpunar, Novall Khan and Daniel Schacter at Harvard split a 21-minute statistics lecture into four parts.^[6] After each part, one group answered a few short questions. The other groups did arithmetic, or read through the answers instead.

When the researchers checked in during the lecture, the tested group said their minds were wandering 19% of the time. The other groups said 39% and 41%. The tested group also took more notes.

On the final test, the tested group scored 90%. The other two groups scored 76% and 68%.

The questions didn't make people more nervous, either. The tested group reported less anxiety about the final test than the other groups.

Doing beats watching

Ken Koedinger and his team at Carnegie Mellon University studied an online psychology course.^[7] 18,645 students took it as a standard online course (a MOOC) built around lecture videos. Another 9,075 also used CMU's Open Learning Initiative, with practice activities and instant feedback.

The video-only group averaged 57% on the final exam. The group with practice averaged 66%. The gap held after the team adjusted for the students' background and what they knew going in.

Then they compared what each student did. Each practice activity went with about six times as much learning as each video watched or page read. The paper's title says it plainly: learning is not a spectator sport. So after each short video, give people something to do with what they just saw.

A 2006 study by Dongsong Zhang and his colleagues found the same pattern with video itself.^[8] Learners with interactive video, which let them jump to any part, learned more and were more satisfied than the other groups. Learners who got video they couldn't interact with didn't learn more.

Feedback tells people why

Practice works better when people find out how they did. Benedikt Wisniewski, Klaus Zierer and John Hattie pooled 435 studies of feedback, with over 61,000 learners.^[9]

Feedback had a medium effect on learning overall. It worked better the more information it carried. So a question that explains why an answer is wrong does more than one that only says “wrong”. When you write a question, explain each wrong answer too.

Why practice used to be rare

So much training is still video and slides. I think the main reason is cost.

In 2010, Bryan Chapman of Chapman Alliance surveyed 249 organisations about how long training takes to build.^[10] One finished hour of basic eLearning took 79 hours of work on average. One hour of interactive eLearning took 184 hours. Advanced eLearning, with simulations, took 490.

Basic eLearning took less than half that time. For a busy team, that's an easy choice to make.

Where we think training is going

That cost is falling. AI can now write questions, scenarios and feedback from your own documents, and a person on your team checks them.

When practice costs about as much to make as a video, there's little reason to ship a video on its own. That's why we think the future of L&D is interactive. Video stays, as one part of the lesson.

What we built

Veurone Studio is the studio for designing interactive L&D experiences. We built it around the research above.

You give the AI agent your documents or a web page. It asks you a few questions, writes the script for you to check, and builds the lesson around your words.

A lesson mixes short videos, short text and practice. Practice means hotspots, ordering, matching, sorting and fill in the blanks. Videos can stop for a question, like the lecture in the Harvard study.

Branching scenarios let people make a decision and see what happens next. Every question can explain its answer. A final quiz has a pass mark and the number of tries you choose.

You see who started, finished and passed. You also see where people stop and which answers they get wrong, so you know which part of the lesson to fix.

You can share a lesson by link on any plan, or add it to your LMS as SCORM on a paid plan.

If you want to try it, sign up for free. No card is needed. Give the agent a document you already train people on, and see what it builds.