Three Vendors Who Save Us Time and Money
Last week, the E-Learning Guild released a free e-book called 75 Tips to Reduce E-learning Costs. It has some very useful tips about how to save both time and money. I participated in the survey used to gather the ideas back a few months ago. After seeing the finished ebook, I asked myself if we have any new insights on the subject, and I thought of some of the products and services that we use to help us save time and money in our e-learning development.
The Narrator Files for voiceover narration. We’ve been working with The Narrator Files for about a year now and have been very pleased with the quality, price, and service. They are very easy to do business with, which makes my job easier. You pick your voice, submit your script online, and then get status updates as your job moves though the production queue. They QA everything thoroughly and rerecord any mistakes. Their pricing and rules are all on their website, so it is very easy to estimate costs. We still have a folks on our team we like to use for voiceover, but when we need a slightly different sound or multiple voices, The Narrator Files is a great option.
3Play Media for transcribing/closed captioning video. We just did our first project with 3Play Media and we’re never going back to the old way. We had several short video clips that needed to be transcribed and captioned for a Section 508 compliant course. The process could not have been easier. The transcription and timing is automated, with a “live” person on their end checking the transcription. We can go into the back end and make any changes ourselves to anything that wasn’t understandable or that required specialized knowledge. They output the captions and the timing in several industry-standard formats, letting us quickly import then into Camtasia for publishing. We spent just a few minutes and, literally, just a few dollars.
Bravo for quick game development. We’ve been a fan of Bravo by C3Softworks for years. They have, in my opinion, one of the slickest looking gameshow engines out there, blowing away their cartoony competitors. Their “millionaire” style game still makes me smile every time I run it. As a business owner, it’s great to have a tool that crates games with this kind of production value by simply filling out a form. And around my house, you’ll find these games at birthday parties, graduations – no event is safe!
On a side note, filling out the E-Learning Guild survey is what inspired my session for this year’s Lectora User’s Conference: 50 Time-Saving Tips for Lectora Development. Even if you missed the conference, you can still download the handout.
