{"id":292,"date":"2009-08-28T11:47:23","date_gmt":"2009-08-28T18:47:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.cosaint.net\/?p=292"},"modified":"2009-08-28T11:47:23","modified_gmt":"2009-08-28T18:47:23","slug":"using-audio-in-courses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.empowerelearning.com\/blog\/using-audio-in-courses\/","title":{"rendered":"Using Audio in Courses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.empowerbpo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/08\/microphone1.gif\" alt=\"microphone\" title=\"microphone\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-586\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.empowerelearning.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/08\/microphone1.gif 150w, https:\/\/www.empowerelearning.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/08\/microphone1-100x100.gif 100w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\" \/>OK &#8211; let&#8217;s start with a statement that should be obvious but clearly isn&#8217;t. Audio and video are NOT interactive (unless you count the student clicking on a &#8220;play&#8221; button). So, when you talk about interactive content, you need to think beyond providing an audio track or a video of a professor talking.<br clear=all><\/p>\n<p>Using audio can be helpful in enhancing learning under some circumstances. Here are some ways that you might use audio:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Provide a second language translation of slides for students who don&#8217;t aren&#8217;t comfortable in the first language.\n<li>Provide content accessible to visually impaired students.\n<li>Provide how-to instructions for students who can carry out tasks on the computer in parallel with the instructions.\n<li>Provide content as audio snippets (podcasts) for students who travel extensively, or who commute.\n<\/ul>\n<p>However, there are downsides to using audio &#8211; especially in business environments &#8211; and you should be aware of them before you invest time and effort in developing audio-enabled content.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Not all computers have audio capability, and some are situated in places where an audio track can&#8217;t be played (e.g. on receptionists&#8217; desks). So you&#8217;ll have to provide all of the same information on the course slides themselves in which case you really aren&#8217;t gaining very much.<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>If you change the course content or need to correct an error, you may need to re-record an audio segment which can be costly. Even worse, if you&#8217;ve used one narrator throughout the course, and then he\/she isn&#8217;t available when you need to make the changes, you might end up re-recording the entire audio for a course to avoid switching narrators just for one audio clip.<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>Audio files are going to use additional bandwidth. This might not be a big issue if all of your students are in the office and accessing the software around your office network, but it can be a problem if people are using dial-up connections. And there are still a lot of them around .<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>Navigating through a long audio track can be a complete pain. You can get around this by &#8216;chunking&#8217; the audio into shorter tracks, but it can still be difficult to navigate quickly to the information that you need.<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>Audio is a slower way of conveying information. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Words_per_minute#Reading_and_comprehension\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Sources<\/a> indicate that an average American adult can read text at about 250 to 300 words per minute, but about half that rate (150-160 words per minute) is the comfortable range to hear the spoken word. And, if there&#8217;s also content on a slide, the audio rate falls to about 100 words per minute.<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>If, after reading the list of downsides to audio, you still think it&#8217;s the way to go, here&#8217;s the good news. It&#8217;s really not very expensive. You&#8217;re going to need a good quality microphone &#8211; perhaps $50 or so &#8211; and software to edit the audio and convert formats. Tom Kuhlmann, in his Rapid eLearning blog, has published some excellent hints <a href=\"http:\/\/www.articulate.com\/rapid-elearning\/4-simple-tips-for-recording-high-quality-audio\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.articulate.com\/rapid-elearning\/13-more-tips-to-help-you-record-narration-like-the-pros\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OK &#8211; let&#8217;s start with a statement that should be obvious but clearly isn&#8217;t. Audio and video are NOT interactive (unless you count the student clicking on a &#8220;play&#8221; button). So, when you talk about interactive content, you need to think beyond providing an audio track or a video of a professor talking. Using audio [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.empowerelearning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.empowerelearning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.empowerelearning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.empowerelearning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.empowerelearning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.empowerelearning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.empowerelearning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.empowerelearning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.empowerelearning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}