How to Make Educational Videos That Engage Your Students for Efficient Learning

Educational videos are powerful tools for teachers to enhance students’ learning both online and in the classroom. By incorporating appealing videos, images, and audio, educational videos can boost students’ engagement and unleash your creativity to achieve better teaching results.

In this post, we will briefly cover the 7 essential elements for making an effective educational video and introduce you to the 2 best online tools to make an engaging educational video in a breeze.

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7 Ingredients for Making an Engaging Educational Video

Well, using videos for education is never new. However, very often too many colors, texts, and animations in the video end up disrupting students’ attention and learning.

So, to help you make an effective educational video and avoid common pitfalls, after interviewing many in-service teachers around us, we put together 7 proven ingredients for making an engaging educational video that increases your teaching efficiency.

1. Have a Clear Teaching Objective

Whether this educational video is made to explain the stages of human evolution, an algebraic equation, or how to correctly use the comma, you’d better make it clear what is the purpose of this lesson in this video.

So students will know what to expect for this lesson and you won't drift off-topic as you create the video. It’s better to have one objective for each video and lesson.

2. Know Your Students

As a teacher and educator, you need to foresee what students may be interested in most, what questions they may raise, and which parts of the video might be most difficult for them the understanding, etc.

So, you can prepare your educational video in a way that best fits your students’ abilities and cognitive levels. A practical solution is to consult with colleagues or do some research online, or directly chat with a couple of your students.

3. Keep Video Short

Research suggests that there will be a significant drop in students’ attention after they watch an online video for more than 6 minutes. In other words, a shorter video is more engaging to students than longer videos.

Student’s engagement with online video after 6 minutes

So, as you create the educational video, you need to take students’ age, the difficulty level of the video content, etc. into consideration. You may break a long video into short segments and each lasts 5 minutes or so. This will effectively avoid cognitive overload and increase students’ attention span.

4. Encourage Proactive Learning

Like in-person classroom learning, an effective educational video shouldn’t be one-way talking. It’s better to incorporate teaching and learning in your video.

Design tasks and quizzes to check students’ understanding

You may design tasks and quizzes like gap-filling or matching games for students to reflect on what you’ve taught minutes ago and this is also a great way to check their understanding.

5. Make it Easier to Read

An effective educational video can easily guide students’ eyes on where to read first and show which words or sentences are more important.

Pay attention to the typography of the texts and elements in the video

You may make your video more students-friendly by doing as follows:

If you have well-organized content in the video, it will also make it easier for students to review the material themselves. So, it's a win-win strategy. Learn how to make an engaging typography video.

6. Gather Video, Image, Audio Assets

Make sure you have everything prepared before you use a video editor to make your education video. As to gathering video assets, FlexClip online video editor and Pexels are two highly recommended sources for high-quality and license-free videos, images, and audio.

Vast assets of images, videos, audio, GIFs in FlexClip

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7. Personalize Your Teaching Video

Facts have shown that students are more likely to be drawn to educational videos that are humorous, authentic, and bear teachers’ unique character and style.

So, just be yourself and be authentic, and speak in a friendly and calm tone and blend your unique sense of humor and care for students into your video. It will make a world of difference.

2 Best Online Tools to Create an Engaging Educational Video in Minutes

Once you have everything ready, now, all you need is a flexible video editor to make all that happen. If you are a computer novice for video editing, using a versatile and easy-to-use online video editor, together with its pre-made education video templates, will save you from a lot of trouble.

Here are two recommended online video editors for you to make an engaging educational video in just a few clicks.

1. FlexClip

FlexClip is a feature-packed online video editor that enjoys 4 million stock assets, including HD videos, images, music, and GIFs in its vast royalty-free media library, and thousands of free video templates. You can easily edit each scene in its user-friendly storyboard and have access to dozens of video tools like text animations, creating picture-in-pictures videos, trimmers, video speed, transition, dynamic elements, etc.

Powerful FlexClip video editor

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It’s watermark-free and there is no software to download. You can enjoy a hassle-free experience for video editing.

How to Create an Educational Video by FlexClip:

If you don’t have quality video footage or photos, just click on the “Video” or “Photo” icon on the left sidebar where you can instantly access tons of HD and royalty-free stock assets and select the one you need.

Upload your video assets or use FlexClip’s stock assets

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Head to the “Templates” tab on the left top corner and enter keywords like “Education” or “Teaching” and select one from 100+ education-related templates to work with.

Select and add a video template to the storyboard

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Replace the original texts and images and clips with yours and customize the texts' fonts, color scheme, style, animation, and motion, alignment, and size, etc. You may use a video filter to make your image and video more eye-catching.

Use different tools to customize the video template

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To highlight the key points, you may use animated shapes and arrows, emojis, etc. in the "Elements" icon on the left sidebar to call students' attention. The gigantic assets of videos, images, and even GIFs and text animations will unleash your creativity to create a gripping education video.

If your lesson is about nature or geology, music or festivals, then the thousands of license-free music and sound effects will help you evoke the exact atmosphere for a particular scene.

Add music from the music library or record voiceovers for your video

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Webcam, screen, and voiceovers’ recording are readily available

Done with the editing. Preview and export the video to MP4 file to your local computer or you can directly share it to your YouTube channel or save it to your Dropbox.

2. Animaker

TIf your students are mostly K-12 students (primary to 12th grade), then making an animated educational video with a custom character of your looks will hook students like a magnet from the head to toe.

Make an animated educational video by Animaker

To that end, Animaker, an online animated video maker, is a flawless choice for you to create an animated educational video, without designing skills. A brilliant feature of Animaker, each animated character's facial expression, action, clothes, props, etc. are full customizable with one click.

How to Create an Animated Educational Video by Animaker:

One thing to mention, for free users you can download a 720P MP4 video with a visible watermark on the left bottom corner of the video.

Now, It’s Your Move

So long as you keep in mind the 7 essentials for making an engaging educational video and properly use the free video templates offered by FlexClip and Animaker as well as their featured video editing tools, we are confident that you will make a captivating and effective educational video loved by all of your students. So, start creating your first educational video with FlexClip now.

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Frank /

Passionate about photography, video-making and travel, Frank is a seasoned copywriter and a beloved father of 2-year-old daughter at FlexClip. He is always keen to share his latest discovery about video marketing and tricks to relive your memories through videos and images.