How to Make a Video Lecture

ByAmy Vidor

Learning and Development Evangelist at Synthesia

Create engaging video lectures that work beyond the classroom.

Step 1. Figure out who's in your room

Before you design anything, you need to figure out who's in your room (metaphorically speaking) for the lecture, what they need to be able to understand or do at the end of the lecture, and any constraints, such as pre-requisites for understanding the lecture.

That means answering three questions:

1. Who is my audience?
2. Where will they watch this video?
3. What other materials will they have access to?

Your answers to these questions will guide your decisions on five design elements of your video lecture.

Video lecture archetypes

• The standalone lecture. A one-off session hosted on a public platform like YouTube or a subscription-based service. You're designing for the broadest possible audience with no surrounding course structure to support the learner.
• The supported lecture. A lecture that's part of a structured course with readings, live sessions, a discussion forum, and formal assessments. The surrounding ecosystem holds the learner, so the video can be more focused.
• The hybrid lecture. A lecture that replaces or supplements a live session, common in higher education and flipped classroom models. The video benefits from shared context — learners have a syllabus, peers, and instructor access.

Step 2: Define your learning objective

Start by asking yourself:

After this lecture, what should learners be able to understand or do?

This objective should move beyond "this is a lecture about retirement accounts" towards "by the end of this lecture, someone should be able to choose the retirement plan that works best for them based on three criteria."

The rule of thumb is one objective per lecture. If you have more than one objective, you're creating multiple videos.

If the video lecture is part of a larger course, I make sure the objective connects clearly to what comes before and after it. If it is a standalone lecture, the objective becomes the organizing principle that keeps the lecture focused.

Step 3: Segment your content

Take it from someone who has spent years teaching in classrooms, it is so tempting to cover the same amount of content that you would in a live lecture in a video.

That's where most video lectures fail. Think about it, when you're delivering lectures live, do you talk non-stop for an hour or longer? Absolutely not.

You likely exchange pleasantries with students and share important updates at the beginning. Perhaps you have a dedicated 5-minute break in the middle for people to stand up or get some water. All of these moments add up to intentional pauses, which you should similarly plan for in your video.

That begins with segmenting your content. A simple framework that may work for you is this:

1. Context. Why are learners spending their time watching this video?
2. Explain. Introduce the core concept, method, or argument.
3. Check understanding. Use an example or knowledge check.

Step 4. Pace yourself

Perhaps the hardest decision you'll need to make is how to pace your video lecture. That's because we often let the amount of content dictate the length of the video.

While there's no "right" length for a video lecture, here's what research has shown. In one study, engagement dropped for videos that are more than 6 minutes in length (to 50% for 9-12 minute videos, and 20% for 12-40 minute videos). In another study, the use of interactivity extended engagement beyond 6 minutes, showing that learners will watch longer videos when they're actively engaged.

What should you take away from this? Keep your videos to a reasonable length, knowing that a series of 5-minute video lectures will likely overperform one 50-minute video lecture.

There are exceptions, particularly for complex material like you have in higher education settings. What matters more than anything, is how you pace yourself through the content. That means signaling what's coming, speaking authentically, and explicitly transitioning from one topic to another.

Remember, a learner can always pause and rewatch or adjust the volume, playback speed, and captions to suit their preferences.

The research behind effective video lectures

• Lectures designed for video significantly outperformed live lectures adapted for online delivery in an empirical study of nearly 7 million video sessions across four MOOC courses.
• Multimedia instruction in conversational language consistently outperforms instruction in formal language. This is Mayer's personalization principle.
• Design principles for effective video lectures depend on context, especially whether learners have access to the instructor and supplemental materials.

Step 5: Choose your materials and tools

Lectures and slide decks go hand-in-hand, right? Yes, in live lectures. But like every other design decision so far, video fundamentally changes the types of materials you can use.

In a classroom setting, I can put a poll on the projector and ask students to log into a third-party site to participate. With certain video tools, I can embed this directly into the video lecture, no third-party platform needed.

As I alluded to, the decisions you'll make around materials are dependent on the tooling you select for your video lecture.

And yet, this is a bit of a catch-22. The types of materials you can use depends on the tools you use to build your video lecture. Here are a few examples to illustrate that.

Should you use an avatar?

Depending on the platform you choose, you may have the ability to use an AI avatar in lieu of recording yourself. Whether or not to use an avatar in a video lecture is a personal decision. You may consider your lectures to be an extension of your personal brand and prefer complete control over your lecture delivery. That's understandable.

Sometimes, I find instructors choose to create a custom avatar when they need better audio quality. If you don't have the right recording equipment or you have to record in a noisy location, an AI avatar tool may be the solution. It can provide you with an authentic talk track that you can direct (including word-level pronunciation control).

Next steps

Your video lectures will get better with practice. Instead of trying to create a perfectly crafted lecture out of the gate, try lowering the stakes.

Use our free video generator tool to play around with how a video lecture plan or previous recording transcript can be transformed into an effective video. Practice recording yourself and test out different pacing. Review it too. Getting used to watching yourself lecture takes practice.