As an association professional I spend a lot of my time thinking and researching about how association members learn, what trends impact associations, and how to position associations for the future in a fast-paced, rapidly changing world. Since I am without my family who is still in North Dakota for the next month, I have had even more time to think about those things, especially as I work to become more knowledgeable about PLUS and the professional liability industry. Two areas that I have been spending a fair amount of time researching and learning more about are the impact of video and of microlearning on education and business. In a future blog post I will talk more about microlearning, but today I would like to spend just a few moments talking about video and its usefulness in learning.

PLUS has already began to make in-roads into utilizing rich media such a video into more of its conferences and educational offerings. To see some of what PLUS has done to utilize video go to the Multimedia tab under the Education tab on the PLUS website. And, I feel confident in saying, that we have only began to scratch the surface on utilizing multimedia, especially video, to provide more robust learning opportunities. Consider the following findings on video and visual learning.

  • People process visuals 60,000 times faster than text alone;
  • Our brains process visual cues in 250 miliseconds;
  • Visual aids in the classroom improve learning by 400 times;
  • We recall information from video 5 to 9 times better than text alone.

This means that with visuals instead of text alone we learn faster and retain the information longer. With growing pressures on time and budgets, companies know that they need to get employees up to speed quicker, be more efficient, and have more engaged employees. Incorporating video into learning can help with all of that.

I want to share a few other interesting things I recently found out about video.

  • 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute;
  • In a recent survey 59% of executives said they prefer watching video instead of reading text;
  • 50% of executives told Forbes recently that they watch business related videos; and
  • People are 85% more likely to purchase a product after watching a video.

Clearly video is and will continue to grow in importance in business and in learning. No doubt it will be ever increasingly used for education and training. And, at PLUS we will be forward looking on ways incorporate video and other new learning methods into its future education offerings.