Developing Educational Videos | Sharing the Process

In my profession as a pharmacist, we do not receive any formal education on content creation. It's all about drilling the therapeutics and medications. While this is fine for a pharmacist working in pharmacy, it doesn't help me with my current job, which has a large focus on education.

For the past six weeks, I have spent hours and hours pumping out a new training video every week for our pharmacy staff. The entire process was new to me and there was definitely a lot of Googling. While it has been exhausting and time-consuming, I have developed a flow that works for me every time.

Since I have received some questions about how I make my training videos, I figured it would be helpful to share my experiences. Note that this post is only intended to serve as a high-level overview of my methods, but I hope to eventually dive deeper into each individual step.

Materials

Below are the materials needed to create a training video:

• Pen & Paper This is to write down your thoughts and outline the video storyboard/script
• Camera Of course, this is used to film your videos. I use the Canon PowerShot Digital Camera G7 Mark II, but smartphone cameras are pretty good these days if you don't own a camera - my only recommendation would be to film in landscape mode unless you're making a TikTok
• Computer and/or Laptop To edit videos, you'll need a decently powerful device. I use a 2020 MacBook Pro 13-inch with a 2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 processor, 16 GB of memory, and 500 GB of storage
• Video Editing Software I use the free iMovie software on my Mac. The free software for PC is Windows Movie Maker
• Microphone This is important to complete your video voiceover. I use The Snowball microphone by Blue, but if you don't have a USB microphone, you can opt to record audio from your phone and import it. Generally speaking, built-in computer/laptop microphones aren't great so I try to avoid this when possible

The Breakdown

Identify the Educational Gap(s)

The first step is to identify what education gap needs to be filled. Figure out what it is that staff do not understand or know. This is often easier said than done considering if you're a subject matter expert in the topic, the gaps may not be as obvious. You may consider surveying the target audience, compiling FAQs, and/or simply observing staff in their day-to-day work to see what is being performed incorrectly. Given my work circumstances, we opted for the observation route.

Breakdown the Topic

As a subject matter expert, it's easy to unwittingly spitball knowledge to the point of information overload for others. I try to breakdown each topic into a logical sequence. For example, presenting information following the usual staff workflow. It is also helpful to explain the why alongside the what because it gives staff more context as to why what they're doing is so important.

Develop a Script

Once you've identified what needs to be covered in the video, start to develop a script. This script should include what images/video clips you want to display and the general message you want the viewer to take away from that particular segment. This will greatly assist you during the filming, editing, and voiceover processes. Below is an image of one of my scripts. However, if you don't have the time to sketch a storyboard, I've definitely just simply typed an outline of my script in Microsoft Word.

Film

This portion is probably the most straightforward once you've done all the prior legwork. Take your camera, grab a friend, set the scene, and shoot! Thus far, my training videos have been to simply demonstrate how-to's of a procedure. Therefore, all I had to do was give staff a little bit of direction on how we were collaborating and film them doing their work.

As a side note, I always like to shoot more film than I think I need in case what I have in mind doesn't work out.

Edit & Voiceover

This step is by far the most time-consuming step in the process. A simple video can take up to 1.5 hours, but on average 6-minute videos have been taking me 3 hours and the one 10-minute video I made took me 5 hours. However, I'd like to note that my editing for these videos have not been very complex and recognize professional video editors for pouring hours into a 1-minute video.

The basic concept of this step is stitching together your video clips as outlined in your script. If any of the educational content does not have a video clip associated with it, I'll Google image search for an appropriate picture to insert.

Once all the video clips and pictures are in the appropriate sequence, I'll voiceover the entire video in segments and explain important points I want the viewer to take away. At this time, I haven't had the luxury to formally write my voiceover script ahead of time so it's usually just whatever comes out naturally for the clip/picture displayed.

Navigating a new software for video editing was daunting at first, but shout out to Think Media on Youtube for posting awesome iMovie tutorials. I'll definitely be posting more on what I've learned on video editing in the future.

Review & Publish!

After all the clips and voiceovers are stitched together and complete, I play the video back in full a couple times to review it for any obvious kinks and volume issues. If that's all ok, then all that's left to do is export and publish!

Experience with Engaging Staff

Overall, I'd say that staff have found my training videos easy to digest and follow. This has helped them be more engaged in the education than ever before. Some of the factors that I think may have contributed to this are as below:

• Stay Light-Hearted Yes, lecturing staff to follow pharmacy regulations and operations can be dry, but that doesn't mean your videos need to be boring. Find a way to teach staff about the regulations in a way that is applicable without reading them the regulations word-for-word
• Include Your Staff Employees have really enjoyed seeing their colleagues featured in the training videos. It makes the experience of watching more personable and highlights to staff (new and old) who might be a good person to ask about XYZ procedure since they were featured in that video
• Film in Your Working Environment By filming in the environment your staff are working in, it makes it easier for employees to picture what exactly is expected of them. This is much simpler than having to extrapolate information filmed in a foreign environment and applying it to their actual environment
• Keep the Bloopers! The filming has not always gone smoothly. I have captured mistakes, small accidents, and clips with poor filming technique. Keep those clips and add them as bloopers to the end of your videos! We're all human and sometimes it helps to show that

That's a wrap. I hope that this is helpful to you if you're just starting out like me. Please do reach out if you have any advice or tips - I'd love to hear what has worked for others.

Until next time!