David Reeve is a director of energy industry training provider Whiteboard Energy.
How do you use video in your business?
Our business is about bringing business school-style learning techniques to the electricity industry. We want our in-class sessions to be interactive and engaging with lots
of discussions and demonstrations - rather than traditional-style lectures - and video plays a part in that.
Tutorials are a necessary part of what we do because they give people that are new to the industry the background they need to take part in the interactive in-class sessions. But doing them in the classroom environment isn't really that fun, and in that environment everyone gets the same information whether they need it or not. So to get around that, a couple of years ago we started developing a resource centre to deliver tutorial content by online video. That way people who need the tutorials can watch the videos as much as they need to and others who don't need them can skip them. Watching them before the in-class sessions means everyone comes prepared and ready to engage in the discussions.
How have you gone about producing your video content?
We're a small business, and because we've had so much tutorial content to produce we decided to do it inhouse; we felt that getting the content right was more important than high production values. To start with we used the functionality in PowerPoint to convert presentations into video slides with audio commentary, which we felt worked well enough for most of our tutorial content.
We've since also become interested in the storytelling aspect of video, because we've found providing historical context is important when you're teaching people about the energy industry. We'd already written up seven case studies about the electricity industry for our courses, but then we discovered Bullendale - the Southern Hemisphere's first hydroelectric power station in the Otago gold country - and thought it would make a great video case study. We invested in some semi-professional equipment, and came up with a good video story on it, which we finished mid-last year. We now use that as part of our online video resource. New Zealand has had some world-leading achievements in its electrical history and we'd love to produce more.
Has learning to do this yourselves been the primary challenge in using video in your business?
It has. Because we're not audio/visual professionals, and we've been using a range of equipment and software, we've made mistakes and found a lot of traps for new players - things like PowerPoint cutting off a few seconds of sound during slide changes, or the standard settings in Apple video software producing only single-channel sound. We've also experimented a lot with where to put microphones and trying to avoid wind noise.
We've also had problems getting the online video tutorials to run within some secure corporate environments because all kinds of internal security settings can stop our videos playing. Our video delivery is based around YouTube, but when companies ban YouTube it has presented a bit of a problem. Initially if the videos didn't load in the tutorials the users were just presented with a blank white space and they weren't getting a clear indication they were missing anything.
So that made us realise we also needed to think about what information the user gets presented with when things don't work.
What impact do you think video has had on your business overall?
Overall it's been really positive. The online video tutorials have definitely achieved their aim of increasing the interactivity of our in-class sessions. We get split feedback on the video material though, and that comes down to people's different learning styles and preferences. Although most people love it, some just prefer to read something and so now we offer both the online video content or written primers for download.
What future plans do you have around the further use of video in your business?
Video will continue to feature in our training and our goal is to make it more interactive, so we'll look at functionality to be able to do that. At the moment though - for what we do - there doesn't seem to be anything that quite replaces being with a class in person.
