Social Video – a new platform for education?

Engaging users with video is clearly paying off for those that invest in producing, licensing and staging it on their web sites. According to Comscore, U.S. Internet users watched 32 billion videos in January 2010. My suspicion is, our multi-tasking world has conditioned many of us to click on videos, before we start reading scores of text. This has game changing implications for anyone that teaches, informs or sells.

In the education world, I am noting many teachers are building and sharing digital assets that can get incorporated into curriculum. Teachertube, Ning Sites for Educators and Sitesforteachers.com to name a few.  Educators are plugging into the fact that today’s students are very comfortable with digital media and have come to expect it – check out how Kaplan has wrapped the web into its brand.

So, what are the implications for today’s authors, subject matter experts and publishers looking to bring their material into virtual and real classrooms? How does one leverage rich, digital media and create compelling content that keeps students engaged and contributing?  One possible method? Social Video.

When one looks at how engaging video is, consider it a lesson platform. Video no longer needs to be linear and TIVO centric (start, stop, pause, forward, reverse). It has the potential to become an evolving, expanding platform that could include click-able links to other resources and facts, live data collected from the web, polls, discussion treads, …pretty much any new subject matter an educator would like to incorporate into the medium. Students could also contribute content, their own video commentary and links right into the video lesson.

Is this new and revolutionary? Not particularly. Consider overlay advertising on YouTube. One can very quickly overlay simple text and click-able links to other online resources. This first generation overlay technology will evolve and need to integrate with other e-learning components.

I have noted one company offering an overlay technology for e-commerce. Overlay.TV provides a platform and tool set for e-commerce sites to use video as a selling tool – users can click on click-able areas of the video and get more information such as current pricing, availability, testimonials.  The net impact? Users are engaged longer, hence they have a higher likelihood of buying – one of their clients noted a 30% increase in sales from visitors (conversion).

Authors and publishers take note. Today’s students prefer to be online, video consumption is insatiable and video is proving to keep the user engaged on web pages. In my opinion,  long term success as a publisher of material will be tied to sorting out how to leverage video as a platform.

What are your thoughts about social video and video as a platform for learning? How do you see video evolving in the classroom? How should publishers leverage it?