What's your take on using audio in eLearning? Do you use audio on every slide because the client says people will think it's broken if you don't? (This This has happened to me!) We've taken this up before and many of us IDs know the strategies for using audio most effectively by now. It's quite fascinating, the conversations we've been having and it's For or against? We know to avoid narrating text word for word, for instance. (You

Tags: eLearning Audio PowerPoint Presentatio While there are many websites you can go to for royalty free images, is there anything for those of us who might want to have some background music … say, if you’re creating a video presentation as opposed to a PowerPoint one? Why, Why, yes there is, and here are a few; FreePlayMusic

Today's post covers importing and synchronizing audio with markers into Adobe Captivate. Tags: extracting regions Audio Sound Forge Narration Adding Markers rapid e-learning adobe captivate elearning development conten This is the third and final part of a short series inspired a question submitted by a subscriber to the... The The E-learning Curve blog shares thought-provoking commentary and practical knowledge for e-learning professionals.

At our seminar today on using Articulate and Moodle and "Doing More for Less" , the conversation turned (as it always does) to using audio in eLearning. They had the SME record the audio for the slides. So here's to more guerilla audio recording! One of the participants talked about a focus group/research project his organization did. I don't have the specifics and I'll try to track him down to find out more because the results were fascinating.

I start by going to eLearning Learning and then I search for something like audio which gets me quickly to a page that's a bunch of great posts and other items all about Audio in eLearning . The keywords on the left are highly related to audio as well, so I'll drill down to pages on Audio Voiceover or Audio Microphone . On the Audio Microphone page I just saw a couple of comments on my post Recommended End of Year eLearning Tools Spending? that were asking about quality differences between a Blue Snowball mic and SHURE mics.

Among these are the following: Audio fidelity will attract attention to media. Audio fidelity will affect people's memory for audio information. People will evaluate better audio fidelity differently than poorer audio fidelity. So, audio fidelity does matter. In The Media Equation by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass (Cambridge University Press, 1996), the authors make some profound and non-intuitive assertions about the ways in which people relate to computers and TVs. I won't go into the experiments that they conducted here, but I'd thoroughly recommend

Today's post about Podcasting for E-Learning covers editing and rendering multitrack audio using the open-source audio editor Audacity. Click on the play button on the YouTube video to view the demo at 240x320 size (which will give you an overview of the editing techniques I'm using), or click here to view the demo (1024x768, broadband connection recommended) to see the editing techniques in detail. The demo is about seven minutes in duration, and requires Flash Player version 7 or better. Typically, a podcast has a number of discrete audio tracks:

The recording expertise found in a studio with an audio engineer will typically produce a higher-quality result. Although a recording session involves give and take between the director, the talent, and the audio engineer, the script owner steers the show. Audio Recording: Preparing Your Script Integrating the perfect voice into an online course, video or slide show enhances the audience’s perception and enjoyment of the program. On the other hand, choosing a voice that doesn’t fit can sometimes feel like fingernails scraping across a blackboard.

Audio is a powerful and impactful tool, but it is often used incorrectly within e-learning courses. A common question is "Should we have audio in the e-learning module that exactly matches the text on the screen?" The general answer is no. It’s not that you can’t learn from audio and text, it is just that the learning is more productive if the two are separate (audio that enhances what is on the screen not repeats it word-for-word). I recently had a discussion with Dan Bliton in his role at the Metro DC ASTD chapter about this topic, here is a small part of the interview.

Good audio is critical to your elearning success. But it all falls apart if the audio quality in your course is not very good. A good mic is going to give you good audio quality. But the truth is that when you compare the acceptable low-quality audio with similar narration recorded with a better microphone, there is a noticeable difference. You might be a great instructional designer and create the most engaging courses possible. In an earlier post we looked at when it makes sense to consider paying for professional narration .