Who are your learners? Are your learners all registered students who signed up for an on-campus course, or are they situated throughout the world? Are they familiar with the use of online study materials, or do they need some extra motivation and guidance in order to study effectively with online materials? Before you start creating video content, it is important to determine who you are creating content for, and how it will help them.

When you think about your target audience, try to answer the following questions:

What are the characteristics of my learners? What are their personalities and cultures like? What motivates and frustrates them? 

Now that you have thought about who your learners are, you can take a look at what you want them to learn. What are your learning goals and objectives? Learning goals are the overarching or higher-order things you want the student to learn. Learning objectives are the concrete and specific parts which are more easily assessed. Sharing your learning goals with your learners manages their expectations.

In order to formulate your learning goals and objectives, you can use Bloom’s Taxonomy. Bloom’s Taxonomy splits up the learning goals and objectives, based on the cognitive processes involved in order to attain them. For more information on useful teaching approaches, check out the Teaching and Learning Guide.

Before you start creating your video it is important to know how you plan on using it. You might have thought about this when identifying your target audience. For example: will your students watch videos as part of an online course? Or will they view knowledge clips to prepare for a face-to-face session?

Try to answer the following questions when you think about the context of your video:

• What are you going to use the video for? (flipped classroom, extracurricular, blended course, fully online course, other?)
• Will the video be a compulsory item or serve as an extra resource in your course?
• When are your learners supposed to watch the videos?
• How are you going to share the video with your learners? (Share open on social media or on a password protected platform)
• How many videos do you want to record and how do they connect to one another? 
• How are you going to evaluate the impact and implementation of your video?