Business uses of You Tube type video to achieve informal learning

A.D. Detrick in Training Day writes about Instructional Design in the Collective World of YouTubers he suggests that organisations can successfully engage with video based learning. He critiques the view that suggests:

YouTube users spend 7-1/2 hours a week on that site. If we put our training on a similar site, our learners will obviously spend that much time learning!

by making the point that YouTube’s “stickiness” are completely useless in the training world where the value of the material is not the length, but the significance to the person needing to learn.

However he goes on to argue that his own engagement with Diet Coke-and-Mentos geysers - for anyone who hasn't seen this yet look here or here - indicates that making something clever enough gets people to engage.

The development of knowledge repositories in a number of organisations has tended towards text based communication yet for many people text is not the medium which helps them understand. For many people images are so much more powerful. So small mobile based video or picture sharing (e.g.) can become the basis of shared company knowledge. But as Detrick goes on to confirm, he and other Instructional Designers will still have a key role even in this brave new world as:

Somebody is going to have to check all of this information, and make sure it’s (at least) accurate and marginally complete. Somebody is going to have tag the information and ensure that it is reaching its target audience in their searches.