Video is the perfect medium for sharing your knowledge with more people because it’s highly engaging and popular, it can be fast and easy to produce, and it helps drive search engine results. When you have a better understanding of how it all works you will be better equipped to harness its power: ensuring that your important work gets the audience it deserves.
What can video be used for?
Videos can be used for a large variety of purposes. Here are just some ways!
- Launch a product, service, brand, event, course, or research study
- Recruitment of participants for a research study
- Staff recruitment
- Video interviews
- Client testimonials
- An overview of research results to disseminate with stakeholders
- A tool to pitch a project or research study to potential funders
- Recruit HDR students
- Testimonials: colleagues, students, clients or patients
- Answering frequently asked questions (FAQs)
- Introduction to course/ subject/ research
- Documentaries
- Website banner videos
- To explain a complex concept to students, patients, staff or funders
- Short social media clips to drive engagement
- Expert interviews as value-adding content
- Raising your profile and growing your professional network
- Setting up an online support group, in which videos provide ongoing motivation and support for members. For example for study subjects who have completed a smoking cessation study, you can provide them with motivational videos to keep them “on track”.
The uses of video are only limited by your imagination. You can combine video with other kinds of media — for example, in your video you can insert footage demonstrating how to navigate your website.
Video For Education
Video is great for sharing information, but it can also serve as a highly effective educational tool. It allows for a more dynamic learning experience: you can incorporate images, tell stories and play music that will engage with your audience and help them understand the content you are teaching them.
There are many research papers that support the use of video for education. For example, in the flipped classroom model, video is an effective method of educational delivery1.
You can use reach more students by educating them via video — either as a pre-recorded lesson that is shared later, or as a video that you record while presenting to your students either in a lecture theatre or from your home or office.
Here are some ways that video can be used as a powerful educational tool:
- Promotional: to highlight a service or product while teaching the audience about its features and benefits. Here is an example.
- Explanation of a process: this can be more easily demonstrated through video than by any other means. Here is one example of a method that can be difficult to explain in words alone. Using video can be a far more effective way of teaching this concept to the audience.
- Demonstration of a technique. This can be easier to show rather than explain with text alone.
- Storytelling: video is a wonderful medium for telling a story because it can be told with the support of words, music, imagery and sound effects.
There are plenty of ways to use the powerful medium of video to share your knowledge and spread it more broadly. You will continue to learn more about video’s power, and with plenty of practical tips you will be better equipped to harness its power for your own benefits.