If you’ve read any of my other blog posts (or, say, met me in person) you might get the idea that I like cool technology. You’d be right. You’d think that, given any chance, I’d want to use audio and video and animation in my e-learning courses. (and you’d often be right). But I recently had a situation where I was the one making the case to avoid using moving pictures and audio.
Like any other tool at our disposal, audio is appropriate in some cases and in appropriate in others. There are some very good reasons to use audio, and some very good reasons to avoid audio. You’ll notice all the good reasons to use audio are content-driven, and the good reasons to avoid audio are a more mixed bag.
Your content is best explained using pictures, particularly if they’re moving pictures. Our brains do better listening than reading when the pictures are moving.You want to provide examples of how something sounds. Usually, this means conversation. Occasionally it might be sounds learners need to understand.You believe people would rather listen than read. Please, and I’m begging here people, do not read things to your learners just because you think they’re more likely to listen than to read. Think back, if you will, to the last time someone read a powerpoint to you? Felt like they were wasting your time, didn’t it? That’s because most people read about twice as fast as most people talk.You think audio is more engaging than written text. Words are or aren’t engaging based on how well they’re crafted, and how directly they’re relevant to what you want to know. People will read books just for fun if they’re written well – and they’ll also wade through terribly written technology manuals to figure out something they need to know.More people are auditory learners than visual learners. While a lot has been written about learning styles, pretty much nobody’s able to show it makes a difference in effectiveness.The course needs to go all over the world. Translation of text is much easier than translation of audio.The course is likely to need frequent updating. Audio – particularly audio timed to moving picture (such as a flash animation).is more difficult and time-consuming to update than text.How do you use audio in your courses? When do you avoid it? And what misnomers about using audio do you find yourself having to explain over and over to others?
This entry was posted on Friday, September 17th, 2010 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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