Ideas for Content - Animations

The Khan Academy is amazing. It's delivered almost 150 million online lesson, mostly in Mathematics but also other subjects such as the Sciences, Finance and American History. One of the intriguing things about the Khan Academy is the apparent simplicity of the content - the 3200 online lessons are all very simple videos, usually nothing more than founder Sal Khan talking while drawing on what's essentially just a blackboard.

One Minute Physics does something similar. The videos are slightly different because they tend to be more cartoon based - incredibly simple little animations that pretty much anyone could draw. Again there's a narrator who in a fairly informal way talks the viewer through different concepts.

Things get a lot more sophisticated with the The RSA Animate series. I could imagine producing something a One Minute Physics animation or even a Khan Academy video lecture - I bet the hard bit is getting the script right (and finding a ‘voice' that people will listen to) but the RSA Animate Series look like they've been created by professional animators and a production team

I did a bit of digging on the web because I was interested to know how the RSA videos were created and came across this blog post, it gives you an idea of the amount of work involved:

Most people who watch the videos find them engaging and my kids particularly like the One Minute Physics ones. But you can't argue with the Khan Academy - it is immensely successful and now the Khan Academy platform is becoming increasingly sophisticated with a lot of emphasis on gamification (giving people badges for reaching milestones) and other tools that make it easier for people to organise their learning and track progress. The RSA Animate series is great too but it's different - more like extended lectures.

It would be interesting to see how you could build the simpler animations into any online course. They'll be relatively inexpensive and they're a good way of explaining concepts and ideas. In the past ‘traditional' online learning content has tended to be Flash based (but Apple and HTML5 are changing that rapidly) and for more advanced material that's heavy on content it's hard to create interactive Flash content (on a limited budget)  that beats reading a pdf (for most people). But the animations would add variety, YouTube style comments mean users can get involved easily and a YouTube Channel like One Minute Physics that showcases your best animations is another way reach an audience and get more user engagement.