Explainer videos

Last updated on August 30th, 2019 at 08:08 am

For a while now, I’ve wanted to learn how to make explainer videos – those animated hand drawing videos that explain something. With the opportunity to teach two classes this semester, both with regular opportunities to create explainers, I figured now was the time to give it a try.

I’ve published my first Instructional Design Explainer video – in this short clip (it is just under a minute), I describe how I view the differences between pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy.

Now, it is not perfect by any means, but it is not bad either. I’m sure that as I do more and get more familiar with the tools I’ll get better at it. One thing that I think will be interesting to see with time is how my “voice” changes – that is, how I change the way I write the script to be more in line with the genre. This is definitely going to take some practice.

To create the video clip, I bought a license for software called Doodly. I’m using a basic license for now, as I don’t need a lot of the ready made assets. For videos, I opted to renew my license for PresenterMedia. I like their clipart in particular, and the license allows me to customize my images (e.g. I removed the shadow and reflection for the explainer video because it would look odd being drawn on the board). I also had to download Audacity – free audio editing software. I used Audacity to record the different clips, and put the clips and images together in Doodly to produce the explainer.

I’ll be posting new explainers on topics relating to instructional design and online learning semi-regularly – at least that is my plan. If you want to be notified of updates, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel. If you have an instructional design topic that you’d like me to create a video for, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

Feature image by PresenterMedia.