The role of learning in today`s world is changing. The pace of life is speeding up and we are confronted with busy work and personal schedules, with not much time left for learning. On the other hand, work tasks are changing constantly and new skills are required to perform them efficiently. Every day, the average person produces six newspapers worth of information compared with the two and a half pages 24 years ago, which is a nearly 200-fold increase. The information overload also makes it difficult to distinguish the most relevant and useful information. As a learning institution we aim to offer access to the most relevant thematic knowledge in user-friendly formats. We therefore naturally have to take into account the above developments. In the recent year, we have scaled up our efforts in making short learning videos or video learning nuggets.

Behind the scenes

These are short three to five minute interviews with top notch experts lecturing and participating at our learning initiatives. We take advantage of their presence at our face-to-face learning events and ask them to briefly and concisely share in video interviews the most recent developments and touch topics that were the most challenging and interesting for workshop participants.

By sharing these videos on our online communication channels we make them available to wider audiences and extend the reach of knowledge beyond our classrooms. It has been pointed out that if social media companies were countries, then Facebook would be the world’s second most populous country (after China) with over 1.1 billion users, followed by Google Plus (693 million active users) and Twitter (554 million users). Taking into account this interesting fact and the latest communication trends, we have in the past year significantly expanded the sharing of knowledge via our social media channels.

Why we decided to go with the video format for the short learning videos?

Learning nuggets is a standalone learning activity that is usually less than 5 minutes in length, which learners undertake in a particular context in order to attain specific learning outcomes (Conole & Fill, 2005). We opted for video simply because this is supposed to be one of the most efficient formats for learning. It has been proven that 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual and that the brain processes such information 60,000 times faster and more effectively than a text. Our brain supposedly remembers 80% of what it saw and did, 20% of what it read, and only 10% of what it heard. Therefore, it is not surprising that visual content and videos became one of the top priority social media trends in 2015.

You can take a look at CEF video learning nuggets on our YouTube channel.

References:

Lukovic, Biljana. 2015. Why are videos becoming so important in social media (marketing)? Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-videos-becoming-so-important-social-media-biljana-lukovic?trkSplashRedir=true&forceNoSplash=true

Alleyne, Richard. 2015. Welcome to the information age – 174 newspapers a day. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/8316534/Welcome-to-the-information-age-174-newspapers-a-day.html

Costill, Albert. 2013. 25 Insane Social Media Facts. Available at: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/25-insane-social-media-facts/79645/