Making training more cognitively effective: Making videos interactive

The cost of health and safety failures to UK industry is currently estimated at up to £6.5 billion per annum with the construction sector suffering unacceptably high levels of work related incidents. Better health and safety education across all skill levels in the industry is seen as an integral part of any solution. Traditional lecture-based courses often fail to re-create the dynamic realities of managing health and safety (H&S) on-site and therefore do not sufficiently create deeper cognitive learning (which results in remembering and using what was learned). The use of videos is a move forward, but passively observing a video is not cognitively engaging and challenging, and therefore learning is not as effective as it can be. This article describes the development of an interactive video in which learners take an active role. While observing the video, they are required to engage, participate, respond, and be actively involved. The potential for this approach to be used in conjunction with more traditional approaches to H&S were explored using a group of second year undergraduate civil engineering students. The formative results suggested that the learning experience could be enhanced using interactive videos. Nevertheless, most of the learners believed that a blended approach would be most effective.