Active Learning

Remember attending a long lecture in school and being bored to death? How about watching a video of someone working on a project and the presenter not explaining why or how they are doing a task? Engagement, action, and activity for subscribers are essential.  You need to promote and incorporate interaction into your projects that encourage subscribers to engage with the content beyond merely typing out the code on the keyboard and looking into the webcam every now and then.

Create opportunities where subscribers can talk about the content that you’re presenting. Provide questions every now and then to get feedback on what they think about your techniques, or perhaps on how they may have done something similar in the past. Subscribers will want to take what you have presented and use it to build their own knowledge by applying what you show and discover new methods of doing things through trial and error. It can be frustrating if they don’t have the basics you present as knowledge to build upon.

See and hear. Subscribers have two ways to receive what you are teaching.

1. They need to be able to see the area you are working on. What you are doing may be really easy and requires little thought, but when you work at lightning speed, it can be difficult to see what you are doing. Explain your moves and actions as you’re doing it.

2. They need to know how to apply the content themselves and be able to access the content later as a reference. Work out loud (provide your thoughts as they occur), so subscribers understand the decisions you make and practice that decision making on their own.

More fun to teach. Isn’t it better to know that what you’re doing is producing positive outcomes rather than a hit and miss situation? You can see what the subscribers are thinking, what their experiences are with similar problems, and how they might be using your techniques to produce their own projects. It can be more rewarding to you as a Project Creator to watch people learn from the instruction you’re providing. Your videos will be more valuable to the subscriber and more valuable to you. You’ll see more followers, and if you have your own business, it’s a great tool to get the word out that you know what you’re doing.