The use of whiteboard animation for educational purposes is changing the way students absorb information. It’s an innovative method that’s been utilized by marketers and businesses to share their brand messages, and now it’s leaving its mark on schools all over the world.

But why? 

A big part of it has to do with the fact that recent events have disrupted the entire educational landscape, forcing all of us to rethink how we do just about…well, everything.

Students may have returned to the classroom, but memories of Zoom and remote learning might be slow to fade. With more and more educational institutions embracing distance learning, Zoom is a bridge that has helped many, but it’s a rope bridge which sometimes has big holes and missing planks. Remote learning has also highlighted the role of the internet as a utility rather than luxury, who’s absence or unreliability can have a big impact.

Some of these issues are harder to fix than others, but whether you found remote learning to be a dream or a disaster, some aspects of it could be here to stay. One of these aspects is whiteboard animation for education. It’s something that has been explaining ideas since the early 2000s and could be the extra teaching assistant you’ve been looking for.

The origins of whiteboard animation in education

Like a pair of old friends, the link between whiteboard animation and learning goes way back. Some of the earliest whiteboard animations were used to bring some very interesting but complex ideas to the screen. These animations were the RSA Animates series, which ran from 2010 to 2016. This series translated the ideas of world-class thinkers and academics into whiteboard videos which tackled subjects such as education, economics and psychology. Today, the RSA Animates have allowed these ideas to be viewed more than 100,000,000 times. We particularly love this series as we had the privilege of being the studio to illustrate and animate it

The RSA Animates really highlighted the power of educational animation to engage viewers. The RSA’s Abi Stephenson explained in a recent interview with us:

“Animation reduces those barriers and opens up a world of ideas to everyone, so that we don’t have to fight to become informed about the world around us.”

This can be seen in comments made about the RSA Animates themselves:

"I learned a lot professor. It is one of the finest videos on Economics and I am sharing with my students." - from Economics is for Everyone! by Dr. Ha-Joon Chang

"I remember watching this in a lecture during my 1st year of Uni...and i was absolutely gobsmacked. One of the few times at Uni where a lecture left me genuinely speechless but in a good way. This is still relevant and needs addressing imo" - from Changing Education Paradigms by Sir Ken Robinson

08:08 It gives me goosebumps, that mix of anger and "OPEN your damn eyes!!" - from Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us by Dan Pink

The connection between whiteboard animation and education goes back even further than this, however. Whiteboard animations evolved from the classroom whiteboard itself. The white background, the hand and the voiceover all come from the classroom, and the very first whiteboard animations were created on physical whiteboards. We filmed over the shoulder of our founder Andrew Park in those early RSA Animates, before making the process work in even more visual richness and explanatory power.

The strengths of animation in education

So, how is animation used in education today? There are a few factors that make animated educational whiteboard videos perfect for the position of extra teaching assistant, and if you could ask them why they’re right for the job, they’d say something like this:

Whiteboard animations make information engaging, memorable and entertaining

The whiteboard animation process uses storytelling to explain and link the points being made. This storytelling is delivered through illustration and visual thinking, animation, on-screen text and a script read by a voiceover artist. The combination of these elements makes the message more entertaining, engaging viewers as they become absorbed in the narrative. This high level of engagement then leads to a greater amount of the animation’s content staying with viewers.

To understand more about what was going on, we approached Richard Wiseman - Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. We’re a fan of his work and always enjoy hearing his contributions when he pops up on a podcast or the TV. We were also delighted to work with him, creating animations for his successful YouTube channel, In59seconds. Together, we compared ‘talking head’ videos with whiteboard animations and made some fascinating discoveries:

• 66% more likely to be shared

• resulted in a 15% increase in information retention

• was 33% more entertaining

Whiteboard educational videos take a multi-modal approach

We’ve already mentioned how whiteboard animations take viewers to a learning mindset based on their call-backs to the classroom, but they go a step further. By using a combination of illustration, animation and audio, whiteboard animations and animated educational videos are primed to work for learners by combining different ways of learning.

Taking this to another level, whiteboard animations offer lots of opportunity to include features which improve accessibility for people with disabilities. These cover areas such as:

• colour choices

• subtitles and captions

• audio descriptions

AccessibilityOz offer lots of great information on this.

Whiteboard educational videos make the complex simple and the dry interesting

Like that person that can breathe life and energy into everything, even assemblies and meetings, whiteboard animations draw on the strengths we’ve been talking about to make very complex or abstract ideas understandable and less exciting topics more engaging.

Complex ideas are made understandable through visual thinking and storytelling. Our brains are hard-wired to process stories and we can combine this strength with visual thinking. At one level, visualising something makes it much easier to grasp but at another level, the way we do this makes all the difference. A textbook graph has all the facts but might struggle to make them accessible, while by using devices such as visual metaphors we can reflect complex or challenging ideas in a new context - one which captures the concepts and qualities in a setting much more familiar and easy to understand. Other tools, such as cultural references, can also be essential in this. We have done this for many ideas, including Professor Stephen Hawking’s Supertranslations black hole theory.

Again, storytelling and devices such as cultural references allow whiteboard animation to reframe this possibly uninspiring but nonetheless essential information into visuals and narratives that are entertaining and memorable. We have done this often around topics like new policy updates, such as this animation on the Senior Managers and Certification Regime.

We couldn’t leave out whiteboard animation’s ability to tailor content exactly to the needs of your message or the audience in this section. From the characters and whiteboard animation images to the tone and choice of voiceover - whiteboard animations allow you to make each aspect perfect and bespoke for the task at hand. This not only ensures you can give your message the precise treatment it needs, it means you can maximise the effectiveness of your whiteboard animation.

Whiteboard animations prompt return visits and are reusable

The final strength we’re going to cover here is one every teacher and teaching assistant needs - plenty of patience. Learning something new, especially if it is complicated, takes time and whiteboard animations are there for you, explaining an idea as many times as it takes to be understood.

Whiteboard animation for education - research by the University of Hong Kong

The Chinese University of Hong Kong conducted their own research into the effectiveness of whiteboard animation for educational purposes in 2019. They operate a ‘flipped classroom’ model of teaching and wanted to see how effective whiteboard animations were as part of a common core science general education (GE) course. The course has roughly 3,600 students each year, from a range of backgrounds, and the university wanted to see how whiteboard animations could help teachers overcome obstacles like a lack of prerequisite knowledge and the misunderstanding of concepts.

In tutorial classes 375 students were given four different whiteboard animations and the research findings are very interesting:

• an average of 59.9% of students watched the animations before tutorials and in general they did better than those who hadn’t. The research paper we linked to above has information on grade differences

• 92.1% of students who watched the animations said they were helpful in gaining knowledge

• 92.7% of students said the animations were helpful in understanding texts and clarifying concepts

• 86.8% of students said the animations were helpful in tutorial studies

We were very happy to read that:

• 87.4% of the students said that the animations had raised their interest in the issues discussed in the tutorial classes

• 86.2% of the students agreed that learning materials in the form of whiteboard animation are more interesting than lecture videos

Student feedback included:

“The expression and explanation in the whiteboard animations are clear and concise. They bring up questions for reflection.”

“The whiteboard animations are clear. They are helpful for understanding and learning, especially for students who didn’t study biology [in high school]”

These findings support our own research and highlight the ability of whiteboard animations in education to explain ideas in a way which makes the points memorable and easy to understand while also creating a greater interest in subjects and ideas. We pioneered the whiteboard animation genre to share important ideas in an open, accessible and far-reaching way and we’re delighted to see they are only being used more for this purpose 11 years on from the first RSA Animate.

Examples of educational whiteboard animations

Whiteboard animations and the whiteboard animation process have a lot to offer educators and students alike. It’s a partnership which is only growing stronger and brings many benefits. For us, this is a joy to see and it’s the source of our passion for whiteboard animation. Today we specialise in the medium and have created animated educational videos for universities such as Oxford Brookes and the University of Kent alongside organisations like the RSA, The Royal Society and TED-Ed.

Whether your audience are in schools, the workplace or the general public, we’d love to speak to you about the message you want to share and the goals you want to reach. Book a discovery call today!