Is the lack of video-based dev training based on cost or ineffectiveness?

Question

I don't see as many video-based dev training programs as I used to in years passed. Is this because of cost or simply that it's considered an ineffective learning tool?

Answer 1

Well, I'm in the training business and have teams that produce dev training (videos and other modalities). There are a couple of reasons why you are seeing less than before:

1. The Target Audience fragmentation - there are many, many technologies out there and to produce anything other than some kind of "general introduction to X" means the target audience will be very, very small. Not so cost effective (cost per head is the usual metric used for free training, i.e. cost to develop and deploy * consumption number).
2. Level of Effort. You'd be surprised at this. If it's a simple screencast, there are a lot of steps to go through to produce quality videos. It's often much more involved than just saying "I'll show someone the new IDE and fire up Camtasia or Captivate to do so."
   • There is market research (what do people want/need?)
   • What is their appetite for consumption?
   • How will we deploy to reach high consumption numbers?
   • What is the acceptable length of time that users will watch screencasts without getting bored
   • How do we storyboard this?
   • Who is the SME that will deliver it and does the SME have a good speaking voice and can he/she effectively deliver training to simply a microphone?
   • Will we beta test the videos for feedback from a selected pool of developers who may have an interest in this topic?
   • Do we have standards around our videos (codecs, compression, FPS, formats) and are our tools (Camtasia, Windows Media Encoder, etc.) set up to automatically produce in our desired formats).
   • How do we market and evangelize our releases?
3. Cost. Screencasts can be some of the most inexpensive training, if you have nailed #2 and #3 above. You have a well-oiled process to produce videos and you've done it again and again. However, if you don't have them nailed and you are re-inventing the wheel each time (even if you have all of them nailed but have new SMEs to do the recording/narration, it can be like starting all over again from scratch), the costs will continue to be unacceptable. Some notes:
   • If your video training is offered for free, you have to seriously justify creating new ones. Otherwise, that's all you'll be doing, day in and day out, for no apparent return on investment
   • If your video training is offered at a price, a whole nother set of metrics come into play to see if producing videos are a viable.
4. Effectiveness. It is very hard to measure effectiveness of video-based training that is just pure video. If it is interactive, such as Flash, you can measure usability (clicks on screen, etc.) and even deploy your training with SCORM packaging and knowledge assessments. But if it's just pure video, there is not a lot of data you receive back to let you know if this training is on the mark or not.
5. Competition. Because screencast-based training has a lower barrier to entry than many businesses (need a computer, a screen recorder, a human and a web site at a bare minimum), there are a lot of people coming into the field. This increases the likelihood of poor training and once people have had some poor screencast training, they get turned off by the whole idea in general (especially if they paid for the training).
6. Discoverability. Finding the right video-based training can be tough. Most video-training is not indexed other than the video title and maybe a one paragraph description. Transcription of voice so that text spoken within the video is searchable is far and few between in video-based training.
7. Leverage. Like most product training, the shelf-life of dev training can be short. Technologies change every few years. That's not so much the issue as having to produce another fully recorded version every time something relevant or major changes. If your dev training was classroom - you usually just update the student manuals, the slides and the labs. In video training you have to do a whole new reshoot - leveragibility is very low.

In summary, there are a lot of things to consider when thinking about creating video-based training. What is mentioned above is about screencasts, the very easiest video to do. If you are doing other things (recording something other than the screen) it gets more complex, time-consuming and costly. You also have to deal with the fact that some users just don't like this kind of training (they want Labs, in-person training, just-in-time access to learning [such as asking a question on SO], a good book, etc.).