In this conversational segment, Christopher Parsons, Christina, and a third participant discuss how to design instructional content for architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms that balances brevity with necessary depth. They emphasize breaking long presentations into modular video clips that align with specific learner queries, enabling quick retrieval of the exact segment a user needs. Christina describes her workflow of documenting processes with an eye toward future searchability, using a Revit CAD‑linking workflow as a concrete example where a one‑minute setting explanation can be isolated from a longer eight‑minute tutorial. The group notes that video is harder to edit than text, so modular clips reduce re‑recording effort when only a small part changes. They also contrast the needs of the practice side—requiring contextual depth—with the design‑technology side, which can benefit from concise 3‑4 minute messages. The conversation references Einstein’s “as simple as possible, but no simpler” principle, applying it to video length decisions, and reflects on the balance between lecture time and hands‑on exercises, concluding that longer sessions may need to be split into multiple parts to accommodate both content delivery and practice exercises.
Chapters
So splitting it up is good from an attention span perspective. It's good because one of the things that you've shared is like, well, take that consultant thing you were just talking about. There's maybe in an hour-long presentation, 9 core topics, 7 core topics. Maybe what the person needs in the flow of work is just topic 6. And so by breaking it down in the lesson, you can say like, just watch just, just this piece of this. That's what you need to watch. Or if I'm searching, that's all I need to find.
Uh-huh.
And I'm wondering if you can talk about that, cuz you've said you've been thinking about designing courses with that kind of retrieval at the end of a searcher or a learner in the future. And I wonder if you can talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, so I come from that, you know, I document everything because the satisfaction of sending somebody a link, not to remove the human factor of it, but just I can get them the answer so quickly by sending them this link, right? So having something to send to somebody has been so meaningful and, accomplishing our work from the DT side of things, that while I was recording, I had the flow of work in mind. I knew that I'm documenting something that somebody in the future will need to access. I'm already thinking how they don't want to go watch an hour-long recording. Now I'm thinking, do they want to watch an 8-minute recording when they only need the 2 minutes?
Hmm.
And so when I'm recording, I'm thinking, what might somebody have a question on? That I would wanna send a link to and that they can just get the answer right there. So it is, it has definitely shaped how I'm breaking my lessons and recordings up. And when I'm introing or onboarding someone to this process, like Brian and whoever else will record videos, I, I try to send them that message too. Mm-hmm. It's, it's different from a design technology perspective. You know, on the practice side, you kind of need the whole picture and the, context, but, but it's something to consider when you're—
give an example of mine of like something that you would have been 8, but you realize there's actually 4 questions in there.
Like it's very Revit specific. Do you want me to get into that? I guess linking CAD files that we use those for existing backgrounds for renovations or site survey files from our civil consultants. And there's a lot of steps in there. Whereas if you were to watch, you know, all the videos, maybe it's 20 minutes long, but somebody may already know how to do the beginning of the linking CAD and they may know what to do once it's in Revit, but there's these specific settings that they missed that are really important that impact the health of the model. And so if I want to explain just those settings, I don't want them to have to watch an 8-minute video about linking CAD. They've already linked CAD, right? But they miss this 1-minute part of the important settings that you press okay to and ignore. Yeah. So it's that kind of thing.
That's great. And one of the things that's nice there too is, you know, videos are great, but they're harder to edit than pages. And so by breaking things down into smaller components, you, if, if the only thing that has changed is the way that Revit has those settings configured, you just replace that 1 minute. You don't have to go back and re-record.
Exactly.
8 minutes or an hour or whatever it is. So it's kind of managing risk a little bit there.
I think it is a little different on practice side. And Christina said context. There are some things we don't want people to find out of context, right? And so we have to, I think on the practice side, what was most informative for the team was just saying you need to get your message across in 3 to 4 minutes. 'Cause that forced them to get to the essence of the issue and not the quantificate or go into any tangents. And I think watching that whole 3 to 4 minute video would be important to really understand cartooning. So I, how to differentiate between what we do on the DT or visualization side from the broader topic of practice is going to be the trick here a little bit.
I've been really curious if we, if we saw the 45 minute Brian presentation, how much of, not that he's really good. He's very concise with his, yeah. Messaging, but, but still there probably would've been things that, you know, weren't needed. And, and did we get most of his message across in 4 minutes? Yeah. Yeah.
Or like 4 minutes, but there were multiple videos. 4 minutes.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, there's this great Einstein quote that's one of my favorites ever, which is as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Yeah.
And I kind of like use that all the time. And I think with video, what I've been saying is as short as possible, but no shorter. Because sometimes things just do have some inherent complexity and it takes 4, 10 minutes, like whatever it is to get to the essence.
Well, and I think our profession is that way, right? There's something you have to persist through to get to the answer and the response. And so we can't have our attention span so short that we don't persist, right? And get to the right answer. And this is maybe a little microcosm of that. How we learn to do this profession.
I've also been thinking, you know, yes, it may take 40 minutes to get your message across, but we do still need to consider the learner. Can they absorb 40 minutes? And so it's not that we don't want all of the 40 minutes of content, it's just that we need to rethink how those 40 minutes are delivered. And that maybe be— that's spread out into multiple courses and not thought of as a one, one-hour presentation.
And that's what we learned in the first cartooning one, that it really should have been two.
It should have been two sessions.
Two one-hour.
Yeah.
And that, that's a reflection, right? That this exercises and the, the things we needed to demonstrate the how to do these things took longer. Okay. Next time we'll do it in two sessions.
So just to, just to make that clear, it sounds like there wasn't any video content missing. It was more time for exercises. Is what we're saying.
Exactly. We actually wish we had le— like there was maybe 20 minutes total of talking and video.
Mm-hmm.
We wished we would've done 10 to 12 or 15.
Mm-hmm.
And the rest of the time on exercises.
Mm-hmm.
And then followed up with another, you know, 8, 8 minutes of video.
