The term pace has already entered this series of E-Learning Curve Blog articles about creating podcasts. In this post I will discuss pace, and then the related concepts of pitch, projection, and pausing, over the next few days.

Now read on…

Famously, there are three major elements in human face-to-face communication: body language, voice tonality, and words. According to Mehrabian and Ferris (1967, pp.248-52)

• 55% of impact is determined by body language – facial expressions, eye contact , body posture, gestures,
• 38% by tone of voice
• 7% by the content or the words used in the communication process

Anyone who has ever taken a course on presenting will have heard the instructor assert the axiomatic 55-38-7 formula to their learners as if it were inviolable, like fundamental physical constants like 0 Kelvin, c, or that TOS is better than TNG*.

David Lapakko (1997) asserts that this formula for communication is part of the “catechism” (p.63) of linguistics, proxemics, and psychology.

And that there is good empirical evidence that it is wrong.

According to Lapakko,

A closer look at the Mehrabian and Ferris (1967) study reveals severe limitations that call for prudence in interpreting their results… the findings may be an artifact of [a] small sample size.

(p.64)

His views are supported by other researchers’ findings, including Burgooon, Buller, and Woodall (1898) and Hegstrom (1979). Burgoon et al consider that:

[The 55-38-7 estimate] is erroneous. It is based on extrapolation of two studies, one comparing vocal tone to facial cues… and one comparing vocal tone to single words… rather than comparing all three.

(p.155)

Hegstrom agrees that:

The formula was pieced together from two different studies.

(p.135)

Indeed, Mehrabian himself believes that his findings are “often misquoted.” In Intercultural encounters: The fundamentals of intercultural communication (1995) he wrote that :

…all my findings …dealt with communications of feelings and attitudes…Clearly it is absurd to imply of suggest that the verbal portion of all communication constitutes only 7% of the message.

The refutation of the 55-38-7 formula is great news for podcasters in general and e-learning professionals in particular, because of course it means that we’re not operating in some notional margin of communication, but in its mainstream, as anyone who has ever created a podcast (or even used a telephone) to communicate meaningful information already knows.

In a sense, content delivery works independently of content; some people, as the saying goes, can make the phone book sound interesting. For those of us without this gift, we have to consider how to maintain interest and engage the audience. One of the ways we do this is to pace the dialog appropriately. I would assert that a narrative must be kept moving at a fairly brisk rate. The secret of pace is:

Allow enough time to each learning point for it to be well understood. Then move on.

Pace is impossible without intelligibility. Conversely, it depends in part by not going too fast. Pace depends on the precise shaping of the meaning and the words in time, and it provides the foundation upon which everything else is built.

When a podcast has a lack of pace, it is often down to another, subtler fault: a lack of organization in the underlying form of a podcast’s content. In the design of almost any good podcast, there should be a series of basic units of information, each occupying a few minutes. Each of these should contain one major learning point and sufficient supporting detail to help establish it as clearly as possible. The format of the podcast should provide light and shade within a piece, allow details to emerge, and a story to develop.

Certain types of verbal and linguistic construction don’t work in podcasts: they contain too much content, too little time, or both. For example, the cold, clear logic of a computer language like Java, or a turgid mass of detail are both death to clear, intelligible verbal constructions in sound.

With that in mind, here is the latest episode from my ‘Other’ Podcast – Transatlantic: the Flying Boats of Foynes (’New and Notable’ according to the iTunes Podcast Store). If you choose to listen to the podcast, you’ll notice that the piece is not merely a narrator telling a story: along with narration, there’s dramatization, eye-witness accounts, and incidental and background music. Other sound elements included in the series of podcasts include archive recordings, wild track, and a very cool sound collage to set the scene for the outbreak of World War 2 in September 1939.

In Part 4 of Transatlantic: The Flying Boats of Foynes

It’s 1939.

In Ireland, the town of Foynes in County Limerick becomes a boomtown because of its airport, and a tourist attraction because of the flying boats. The ground staff of Pan Am, and BOAC became part of the community, and the various Irish, British, and American communities live, work and play together.

But in Europe, events leading to the greatest conflict of the 20th Century are beginning to move apace as Fascism rises in Europe.

Autocratic single-party regimes in Germany and Italy have become totalitarian dictatorships. As their military might grows, their leaders lay their plans against the nations of the West…

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Click here to view the transcript of this podcast (PDF, 26K).

The observant among you will notice that the piece isn’t about e-learning. That’s OK – the point of e-learning is to provide training professionals with a means of creating and distributing content that enables people to acquire information, knowledge, skills, and expertise on a diverse range of subjects: as e-learning practitioners, it’s our job to facilitate this process.

More…

–

*Humorous Remark Alert! No Trekkie flames please; we all know that Picard is a better captain than Kirk…

__________

References:

Burgoon, J. K., Buller, D. B., & Woodall, W. G. (1989). Nonverbal communication: The unspoken dialogue. New York: HarperCollins/Greyden Press

Hegstrom, T. (1979). Message Impact: What percentage is nonverbal? The Western Journal of Speech Communication, 43, 134-142.

Lapakko, D. (1997) Three Cheers for Language: A Closer Examination of a Widely Cited Study of Nonverbal Communication. Communication Education, 46. [Internet] Available from: http://resourcemagazine.co.uk/acatalog/lapakko.pdf Accessed 31 July 2009

Mehrabian, A. (1995). Intercultural encounters: The fundamentals of intercultural communication (3rd ed.). Englewood, CO: Morton Publishing Company.

Mehrabian, A., & Ferris, S. (1967). Inference of Attitude from Nonverbal Communication in Two Channels. The Journal of Counselling Psychology, 31.

–

Anthony Bates, author of Technology, e-learning and distance education (2005) states that audio (via radio broadcast) has been used in education for over seventy years. Examples of its uses include school broadcasting, informal general education, social action programming, and adult basic education and literacy (p.117).

Since its inception in 1969, the British Open University supplied about one-fifth of its output via radio programming. Typically it such programming centered around:

Discussions of course material or issues covered in printed materials

• Alternative viewpoints to those contained in the printed materials (i.e. guest speakers interpreting a text)
• Source materials for analysis (i.e. children’s speech patterns)
• ‘Performance’ pieces, including poetry readings, dramatizations of literature, musical performances

There are of course drawbacks to delivering content via radio broadcast or via analog tape. Radio broadcasts are wholly dependent on the broadcaster’s schedule, and minority programming is usually relegated to inconvenient “graveyard slots” – the learner has no flexibility around the schedule. Similarly, broadcasted material happens in real-time – the learner has no facility to ‘rewind and play back’ a presentation if they miss a point, unless they tape the program ‘off the air’ (if you’re old enough to remember, you’ll recall that this could be a messy business).

Cassette tapes had their problems too: analog recordings deteriorate with use and over time, tapes cassettes have many moving parts, the actual magnetic tape can break and become degaussed, and if you have a lot of them, they’re bulky to store.

The introduction of CD-ROMs in the late 1980’s mitigated most of these issues, and in a sense were the hardware breakthrough that presaged the beginnings of e-learning as we know it today. However, CD-based materials were expensive to produce, many pre-Pentium and PowerPC processors couldn’t handle the multimedia requirements needed to view and listen to the material delivered via this medium (800×600 CRT monitor, anyone?).

It was the emergence of the internet that genuinely facilitated audio and visual media-based learning. But that, my friends, is a tale that’s still being told, so I’m not going to discuss it here.

The Open University today, on iTunes U

All I will say here is that the internet enables access to e-learning content:

• For Anyone. E-Learning resources are available on-demand, via synchronous and asynchronous channels
• Anywhere. Digital content can be distributed just as easily on a home-based PC, a laptop, or (increasingly) via a mobile device. Content can be viewed both online and offline for maximum flexibility.
• At Any Time. You no longer need to rely on an IT department for distribution of large media files; content is easily delivered on demand to facilitate self-paced, OTJ and just-in-time learning.

Now read on…

The purpose of this long pre-amble was to emphasize the importance of understanding your target audience. When you start work on a podcast, you must be aware of not only what is to be said, but also to whom you want to say it. This is not merely a matter of your audience’s intelligence, but also of background, experiences and outlook. It is also powerfully related to the things that the listener would like to do – ranging from learning Spanish for a vacation, to passing their Microsoft Office User Specialist certification.

Podcasts – like blogs – develop a distinctive ‘personality’ according to the characteristics of the source material, the type of audience that material is aimed at, and the individual or team who produce the podcast. So, a Wired News podcast reviewing the latest and greatest computer technologies will sound very different from a podcast about conversational French for beginners.

A study in to the effect of BBC educational broadcasts noted that too many ‘teaching points’ (what we usually call learning objectives) – more than six per 15 minutes of programming were definitely bad for the user’s learning curve. Interestingly, where long, complex sentences with difficult vocabulary and a lot of prepositions did appear to have an adverse effect on intelligibility, the presence of a large number of adverbs and adjectives did not.

The conclusion was drawn that an apparent excess of facts, figures and descriptive terms is no disadvantage, because although they may not be assimilated themselves, they help maintain interest during the learning intervention.

More…
___________

References:

Bates, A. W. (2005). Technology, e-learning and distance education. Oxford: Routledge Falmer

Read more: http://elearningcurve.blogspot.com/2009/07/exploring-podcasting-for-e-learning-and.html#ixzz0MjnglJ8i

–

First a little about podcasting…

A podcast is one in a series of digital media files (usually in either  audio MP3 or video M4V format) that is released periodically and made available for download by means of web syndication.

This syndication aspect of the content delivery is what differentiates podcasts from other ways of accessing files, such as simple download or streaming. Special client software applications called RSS aggregators (also known colloquially as podcatchers) such as Apple  iTunes or Nullsoft Winamp can  automatically identify and retrieve new podcast files in a given series when they are made available, by accessing a centrally-maintained ‘feed’ that lists all files currently associated with that particular series.

New files can be downloaded automatically by the podcatcher and stored locally on the user’s computer or other media device for offline use, enabling the audience to download content that is released episodically without having to manually check that new material has been made available.

According to the Horizon Report (2006) podcasting is

At the leading edge of a wave that will last for the next several years and beyond, personal broadcasting takes advantage of small, easy-to-use devices that people already carry to capture and share personal experiences, information, and events. This trend, which has roots in text-based media (personal websites and blogs), is expanding to include audio and video, as the tools for capturing and sharing those media become smaller and better. From podcasting to video blogging (vlogging), personal broadcasting is an increasingly popular trend that is impacting… audiences.

(p.11)

It’s easy to see why podcasts have value in e-learning. Will Richardson states in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms that the

underlying technology here is digital recording and the idea that it is now very easy to create and publish these recordings… As long as you have a way to make the recording, and as as long as your students have access to the Internet, you can make this work.

(p.113)

Now that I have started publishing podcasts, I’m obviously going to write a series of articles about developing and delivering content using this learning channel. What’s more, I will discuss podcast authoring using production techniques, based upon my experiences as a radio documentary maker in a ‘previous life’ – I’ll be talking about the craft of writing for audio, as well as the technical aspects of the process.

Now, [drum roll] I want to introduce you to the E-Learning Curve’s Other Podcast. This podcast service is about subjects that interest me other than e-learning. Topics I’ll be covering include aviation, history and music, among others. The first set of podcasts is called Transatlantic: the Flying Boats of Foynes:

July 2009 is the 70th anniversary of the first scheduled trans-Atlantic airplane passenger service. Told against a backdrop of the momentous events of World War Two, this eight-part podcast documentary series by Michael Hanley tells the story of a unique era in world aviation.

Airlines like Pan American Airways (PAA) and the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) with their flying boats like the Short series of planes, and the massive Boeing 314 ‘Clippers’ were welcomed to the seaport of Foynes, in the embrace of the River Shannon estuary on the Western edge of Europe. Come with me now as we fly back in time to the Golden Age of Aviation, a era of adventure, conflict – and the invention of Irish Coffee.

Parts 1 and 2 of the series are now available. You can listen and subscribe to each episode here, or you can access the podcast via iTunes. The next installment, The Glamour of Travel will be released on Tuesday July 28th, 2009.

The more observant among you will have noticed that this podcast channel is called the Other Podcast, which implies that there is a regular E-Learning Curve Podcast, discussing subjects associated with learning and development.

Yes there is. And it’s on it’s way soon. More about this closer to its launch.
___________

References:

The New Media Consortium (2006). 2006 Horizon Report. [Internet] Available from: http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2006_Horizon_Report.pdf Accessed 15 July 2009

Richardson, W. (2006) Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

–

Rather, it is an approach to content development that enables SMEs to author content quickly and efficiently, typically using learning professionals as coaches and assistants in the process.

The two tenets of rapid e-learning are:

1. Ease of development 
2. Short development time frames

The key to successful rapid e-learning is having tools and templates that make it easy for practically any expert to quickly create effective learning materials.

However, rapid content authoring is only part of the story. The end-to-end content design, development, delivery, management and maintenance cycle demands a broad range of skills (I talked about some of these here), and a number of computer applications to support and leverage these steps of the e-learning development process.

In my never-ending pursuit of enhancing performance when using the Rapid E-Learning methodology, I regularly assess new applications, tools, and utilities to assess their value in my learning and development content production procedures. Here are the applications I’m going to evaluate over the next few months. Of course, I’ll blog my views on them over that period of time. Interestingly, only a few of these apps are ‘pure’ e-learning development tools; the others I intend to use to facilitate aspects of the content development process, rather than to actually develop learning materials.  

Serena Prototype Composer 2009
Serena Prototype Composer is an application planning, modeling and prototyping environment for non-technical users to visually define their application needs, including business processes, activities, user interfaces, requirements, and data. Models can be derived from existing resources such as Web applications and can be published as running prototypes as well as Microsoft Word specifications.

WebCAT
The Web Category Analysis Tool is an open source utility that allows designers and usability engineer to test a proposed or existing website or CMS/LMS ontology or categorization scheme. This enables  knowledge managers (and instructional designers) to determine how well taxonomies, categories and learning content objects are understood by users. WebCAT is a variation on the traditional card sorting paradigm, where  users are guided to generate a category tree or even a folksonomy.

Stanza Desktop
Stanza Desktop is an e-book publishing tool, designed for generate digital publications, including electronic books, newspapers, PDFs, and general Web content for a range of hardware platforms. It supports HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and Rich Text Format reading, as well as all the major e-book standards: unprotected Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT, Palm doc, and the International Digital Publishing Forum’s new EPUB Open eBook standard. According to the developers, Stanza is designed to to make reading on your Macintosh, PC or mobile device an “enjoyable and hassle-free” experience.

iWebkit
iWebKit is a GNU-licensed file package and content framework designed to enable those without the time or the programming skills to use the iPhone SDK to create iPhone and iPod Touch compatible websites and webapps. According to the developers, the kit is accessible to anyone – even people without any html knowledge. and is simple to understand thanks to the included tutorials. We’ll see.

Microsoft Learning Content Development System
The Microsoft Learning Content Development System (LCDS) is a free-to-use tool that enables the developers to create interactive, online courses. The LCDS allows anyone to publish e-learning courses by completing the easy-to-use LCDS forms that seamlessly generate highly customized content, interactive activities, quizzes, games, assessments, animations, demos, and other multimedia.

PowerManual
PowerManual addresses the needs of presenters, trainers and anyone  who uses PowerPoint on a regular basis. PowerManual enables you to produce high quality documents  in a range of formats, including Word, PDF and HTML.PowerManual enables the creation of cover pages, logos, custom headers and footers, document pagination, on-the-fly slide updating, as well as PowerPoint slidestack management.

As I said, I’ll be reviewing the apps, testing and reporting on their functionality, ease-of-use, suitability of purpose, adaptability to e-learning, and so on. I’d like to hear your opinions: do you already use some or all of these tools? What do you think of them? Are you going to evaluate them yourself, based on my suggestion? Are there any other tools in the same space that are more effective?

Let me know what you think by commenting in the space below.

–

Brandon Hall Research, domain analysts for the e-learning industry and providers of  information about tools, technologies, and best practices related to employee training and enterprise learning have just released a comprehensive new guide called Authoring Tool KnowledgeBase 2009: A Buyer’s Guide to 120+ of the Best E-Learning Content Development Applications.

According to their press release, "the current edition of this online, database-driven KnowledgeBase contains 10-20 page profiles of 122 content development tools" including:

• 65 products to create online courses
• 26 products to create online tests and assessments
• 20 products to create software simulations
• 23 products to help you convert your legacy content to e-learning
• 9 products to create non-software simulations
• 8 products to create instructional games

They also include two online software applications:

• A selection tool that helps you narrow your product search by filtering out the tools that don’t meet your needs
• A comparison tool to help you see how two similar products differ

I recently published an article called What’s on your e-learning bookshelf? In it, I listed my shelf of “go to” e-learning texts. I’ve re-published the picture of my shelf below, so that you can see, right there in the middle, a text called E-learning Tools and Technologies by Horton and Horton.

In the early part of this decade learning and development professionals and educators found this text to be an invaluable reference resource. If you had a requirement to understand a new training modality or learning channel in a hurry (as many of us did in five or six years ago as we faster, better, and more integrated communications networks burgeoned) the Horton and Horton text was a good place to begin to find out about it. However, as we reach the end of the decade, the tools and some of the technologies in text (I have the first edition) is looking decidedly dated; Blogger.com was still owned by Pyra Labs; podcasting is not given a look-in in any shape or form. As far as I could discern through a brief search (on Amazon, Wiley Books Online, and Google Books), the 2003 edition is still in print.

The outcome of this is that while the text is still full of good advice, useful information, and valuable insight into topics associated with e-learning design, development and delivery, many  of the products it highlights are deprecated (Authorware), redundant (GoLive), or changed beyond recognition (most products featured in the text). In my view this is where resources like the Brandon Hall KnowledgeBase come into their own. While, necessarily, the text and the information is not as rich as in the Horton and Horton book (see Figure 1 for a comparison between the layout of the two resources), it’s competitive advantage is that is delivers bang up-to-date, regularly refreshed information, and a easy-to-use selection and comparison utility to choose and compare products.

Figure 1. Side-by-side of the texts: Horton (l), Brandon Hall (r)
[Click to enlarge]

In one sense, this is the threshold between the analog and digital forms of information delivery. Putting my cultural anthropology hat on for a moment, I would characterize this as a liminal state. Liminality has been described as "the place in between" (La Shure, 2009)  infused with ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy.

For example, as a university lecturer delivering a course on learning technology do I include E-Learning Tools and Technologies on the required reading list, or the more up-to-date Authoring Tool KnowledgeBase? How do I set a question on the information in the latter source as it is in one sense, just a list and description of products and their capabilities, with none of the context provided by the former text? Which is more "academic?" Does this reflect the text’s accuracy? Is the cost ($795 annual subscription) of Brandon Hall membership justifiable for students, or people who just was occasional access to information, as opposed to about $40 for the out-of-date Horton and Horton text. How much is the information worth?

These are  difficult questions to answer satisfactorily.

I have no doubt that over time, e-texts will become integrated into the mainstream of academic, professional, and consumer activity. Online libraries like MyAthens already provide access to a range of electronically-available materials for a nominal fee to the individual user as membership to institutions, universities, and libraries.

E-readers like the Kindle, and e-book software like Lexcycle Stanza (recently purchased by Amazon) are beginning to provide the facility to view electronic versions of printed texts.

Maybe this electronic means of access will become more generalized; I use Stanza on my iPhone and it’s changing my reading habits. Perhaps the current practice of hard- and e-texts being used in concert will become firmly embedded as the most effective method of using the old and the new. As usual, people will do what works for them, and the usual rules for adoption of innovations will apply.

Yet the question remains: How out-of-date is too out-of-date?

I think that my Horton printed text still has great value, especially in the context it provides for e-elearning-related technologies; yet I can’t rely on it to provide current information about specific e-learning authoring applications. With over ten years experience in the learning and development industry, I feel competent to apply my well-developed critical faculties to find out what I need from the range of knowledge and information at my disposal. Could I make my tacit, hard-earned ability to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information available to some-one else? Probably not.

How do you use the resources at your disposal? I’d love to hear your views and about your experiences – let me know.

___________

References:

Brandon Hall Research. (2009). Authoring Tool KnowledgeBase 2009: A Buyer’s Guide to 120+ of the Best E-Learning Content Development Applications. [Internet] Available from: http://www.brandon-hall.com/publications/atkb/atkb.shtml Accessed 29 June 2009

Horton, W., & Horton, K. (2003). E-learning Tools and Technologies: A consumer’s guide for trainers, teachers, educators, and instructional designers. Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

La Shure, C. (2009). Liminality. [Internet] Available from: http://www.liminality.org/about/whatisliminality/ Accessed 29 June 2009

–

This session will cover:

• Why use audio in e-learning?
• Using non-linear editing tools
• How to record audio
• How to produce audio
• How to integrate audio into commonly-used rapid e-learning applications

 

Here’s the agenda for the full two days of the Lights, Camera, Action: Using Media to Engage the Learner event.

Opening General Session
Thursday, June 4 — 8:30a to 9:45a

•     Selecting Media for Learning: Thinking Inside and Outside the Box
  • Patti Shank, Learning Peaks LLC

Concurrent Session Block 2
Thursday, June 4 — 10:15a to 11:30a

• 201 | Integrating Audio into E-Learning Courseware
  • Michael Hanley, Cúram Software, Ltd.
• 202 | Rich Media on a Poor Budget
  • Jeff Tillett, T-Mobile

Concurrent Session Block 3
Thursday, June 4 — 12:00n to 1:15p

• 301 | Finding, Hiring, and Directing e-Learning Voices
  • Harlan Hogan, E-learningvoices.com
• 302 | Rapid Video and User Generated Video
  • Mark Chrisman, T-Mobile

Concurrent Session Block 4
Friday, June 5 — 8:30a to 9:45a

401 | Creating Interactive Learning Experiences With Video in Flash

John Crider, Intuit, Inc

402 | Storytorials: An Instructional Strategy for e-Learning

Kevin Cassel, James Kinnamon & Pete Safran, SAI Global

Concurrent Session Block 5
Friday, June 5 — 10:15a to 11:30a

• 501 | Sometimes a Video Isn’t Just a Video
  • Stephen Haskin, S  Media
• 502 | Immersive Simulations that use Voice Technologies
  • Paul Howe, Allen Interactions

Closing General Session
Friday, June 5 — 12:00n to 1:15p

• Cool Tools: Spice Up Your Training with Web 2.0 – Legally
  • Michelle Lentz, Write Technology

If you’re participating, I hope to see you there (metaphorically speaking), and best of luck to all presenters as well as the backroom team of organizers and moderators who have worked so hard to make this event happen.

–

Here’s what the Forum will cover:

It wasn’t long ago that e-Learning developers thought that putting a simple Flash animation and a small sound file into their e-Learning offerings was really leading-edge stuff. But today much more advanced technology, like higher bandwidth, gaming, and immersive learning techniques, is easily available. And, ever-more-sophisticated learners, who are demanding more effective and absorbing e-Learning programs, are pushing for adoption of advanced media techniques.

This Online Forum will show you how to use audio, video, animation, and other technologies to enhance the engagement and “stickyness” of your e-Learning offerings. You’ll see real-life examples, and learn various design approaches for effectively using media. This Online Forum is your best chance to focus on improving the e-Learning you create for your organization, and to…

• EXPLORE how using different media tools and processes can enhance your e-Learning offerings,
• DISCOVER how better use of media enhances a wide variety of topics and formats,
• EXAMINE the design and development of media-use techniques to achieve specific goals,
• LEARN how other organizations are using media to build engagement into their e-Learning programs, and
• ENSURE that your e-Learning meets both your learners’ and your organizations’ goals.

I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting the Forum session on using audio in e-learning. Called Integrating Audio into E-Learning Courseware, session participants will learn the audio production lifecycle, see examples and demonstrations, and get hints, tips, and tricks-of-the-trade to enable you to produce high-quality audio for your courseware. You’ll  learn how recording subject matter experts as they describe a process, task, or activity, when well-recorded and produced can, in most cases, be integrated into courseware without taking the extra steps of hiring a professional voice-over artist to re-record the narration. This can lead to considerable savings in time and money, as well as reduce the time-to-market of courseware.

In this session, you will learn:

• Why use audio in e-Learning?
• The uses of non-linear editing tools
• How to record audio
• How to produce audio
• How to integrate audio into commonly-used rapid e-Learning applications and podcasts

When learning with multimedia, research shows that visual imagery is better retained when accompanied by verbal information; that learners are better able to integrate information via multi-modal instruction. Called the Six Principles of Learning, it describes how information encoded and transmitted using both visual and auditory channels reduces the cognitive load on the learner, so their working memory can process information more effectively.

However, most e-learning professionals perceive that creating and integrating high-quality audio is a highly-specialized activity outside of their expertise. But now more than ever, e-learning technology and content production skills are a key requirement for learning professionals who wish to interact with their audience.

So join me on Thursday by clicking here to register for the event. if you haven’t already registered, I’ll be delighted to see you there.

–

As you may recall, I posted on eLS when the suite was released, and while welcoming this addition the e-learning practitioners’ content development toolkit, I tempered my enthusiasm as follows:

Where I think Adobe missed a trick is that they should have released this package at least five years ago. While we can say that in the early 2000’s, the e-learning industry wasn’t as large a market segment as it is today, it was substantial enough. Certainly enough of a market segment to be a valuable revenue-generating stream for the company. Unlike DTP, graphical design, and video post-production (which were digitized evolutions of existing industries) e-learning was a whole new industry, a real-life child of the World Wide Web.

I’ll give with one hand and take away with the other: well done Adobe, great to see you’ve finally committed to e-learning; equally, an e-learning suite of tools is such an obvious addition to your product range that you should have done this years ago.

The suite consists of the following apps:

	Tool	Adobe’s Description
	Adobe Captivate® 4	Create and deliver rich interactive content
	Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4 with CourseBuilder Extension	Design, develop, and maintain standards-based websites and applications
	Adobe Flash® CS4 Professional with Learning Interactions	Create and deliver rich interactive content
	Adobe Photoshop® CS4 Extended	Discover new dimensions in digital imaging
	Adobe Presenter 7	Rapidly create high-impact Adobe Flash presentations and eLearning courses from PowerPoint
	Adobe Soundbooth® CS4	Create and edit audio with ease
	Adobe Acrobat® 9 Pro	Protect documents and accelerate information exchange with PDF

Very full-featured indeed: if I was starting work today as a learning and development professional and I was handed this set of applications as my courseware production platform, I would be very happy with it.

But don’t just take my word for it: here’s (a very highly abridged version of) what Donald Clark has to say:

It is a complete and tightly integrated solution for authoring rich learning content. …All-in-all the Adobe eLearning suite is a great product for designers, being that it is the first elearning suite.

His review describes the applications and functionality of the Suite in very good detail, and Donald uses his own experience of using the platform to throw further light on how the applications integrate to enable e-learning designers (“instructional designers, developers, and other learning specialists”) to create high-quality courseware.

Donald concludes his article by discussing what he’d like to see in version next of the Suite and his overall impression of the package. Click here to read the review in full.

Note: Adobe have published and are maintaining a useful blog for Captivate users. Click here for more.

–

In the meantime, the eLearning Guild have just published an informative primer called Making a Demonstration Video for E-Learning Use.

The article in Learning Solutions e-Magazine discusses a favorite of mine: straight-forward ‘How-to’ video demonstrations. The authors, Steve Haskin and Tim Martin describe this learning modality:

“How-to” instruction is an important training modality; in fact, “learning how to do things” is the cornerstone of being human. Our lives are spent learning how to do things, and this doesn’t stop simply because we “learn” in the workplace or even when we slip the “e-” in front of learning.

(p.2)

In this context then, tasks and activities can be elucidated using a number of video based approaches including:

• Sequenced still images
• Video
• 3-D animation

Video photography is basically light captured on a medium like film, video tape, or DVD. However, lighting a subject properly is something of a black art and if done poorly will undermine the learners’ ability to interact with the subject matter. The article’s authors discuss the basics of lighting in reasonably good detail, including key-, fill-, and back lighting, as well as color temperature, and new lighting technologies like fluorescent and LED light types.

They go on to describe the importance of a good tripod, and what you should look for in a video camera. I would agree with their assertion that HD cameras “are complete overkill” (p.7) and in fact that good old reliable MiniDV digital tape is still the best video media choice for e-learning practitioners – your content is captured as uncompressed DV-AVI video (so it can be edited and rendered in either NTSC or PAL as well as in various compressed formats), and MiniDV is a great archive format.

The authors conclude by discussing the pros and cons of various video codecs, their benefits and disadvantages.

Video can seem technical, overly-involved, and even intimidating to the novice videographer: I suggest that you have a look at the article if you want a good introduction to video for e-learning and if you want to know your blondes from your redheads. (They’re types of light: I wasn’t being rude!)

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References:

Haskin, S., Martin, T. (2009) Making a Demonstration Video for E-Learning Use. Learning Solutions e-Magazine [Internet] Available from: http://www.elearningguild.com/articles/abstracts/index.cfm?id=302&action=viewonly Accessed 30 March 2009

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It’s gratifying to see that this series about integrating sound and narration into rapid e-learning authoring environments is being so positively viewed, and hopefully my suggestions are being folded in to your workflows as you create e-learning content for your audience. But firstly, why use audio at all?

The Science Bit

According to Colvin Clark & Mayer (2002) there are six different "broadly applicable" media element guidelines to follow when undertaking e-learning instruction. These guidelines are:

1. The Multimedia Principle: Use words and graphics rather than words alone.
2. The Contiguity Principle: Place corresponding words and graphics near each other
3. The Modality Principle: Present words as audio narration rather than onscreen text.
4. The Redundancy Principle: Presenting words in both text and audio narration can hurt learning.
5. The Coherence Principle: Adding interesting material can hurt learning
6. The Personalization Principle: Use conversational style and virtual coaches.

The Modality principle

When learning with multimedia the brain must simultaneously encode two different types of information, an auditory stimulus and a visual stimulus. These two sources of information do not overwhelm or cognitively overload the learner’s capacity to acquire information. Rather, psychological research has shown that verbal information is in fact better remembered when accompanied by a visual image.

Baddeley and Hitch (1974) proposed a theory of working memory which hypothesized two largely independent subcomponents that tend to work in parallel – one visual and one verbal/acoustic. As we know from everyday life, we can simultaneously process information from our eyes and ears; replicating this phenomenon in an educational context can be beneficial for learners.

This dual-coding theory, first proposed by Paivio (1971) was applied to multimedia and e-learning by Richard E. Mayer and his associates. Mayer has demonstrated (2002, 2004) that learners are better able to integrate information via multimodal instruction. In a number of studies, Mayer and his colleagues tested Paivio’s dual-coding theory using multiple media channels. They found that students learning via multimedia (animation and narration) consistently did better on transfer questions than those who learned from animation and text-based materials. That is, they (the learners) were significantly better when it came to applying what they had learned via multiple media channels, rather than unimedia (visual only) instruction.

While instructional content using multimedia learning was initially limited to logical and scientific processes that centered on cause-and-effect systems, over time it was found that the modality effect could be extended to other educational domains.

Information can and (should even) be encoded and transmitted using both visual and auditory (narration) channels. If verbal information is encoded auditorily it reduces the cognitive load of the learner. Consequently their working memory can process information more effectively. Mayer has calls this the the Modality Principle.

Adding audio to Adobe Captivate projects
Adobe Captivate, like a range of e-learning authoring environments enables you to leverage the Modality Principle by adding narration, music, wildtrack sound, and almost any other sound to learning content to enhance learning. For example, you can:

• Add a background track that plays for the duration of the project.
• Add sound to an individual slide.
• Add sound to a specific object, such as a caption, click box, highlight box, or button

Getting Started
For a refresher on creating markers in an audio editor click here. In sound editing, an audio file REGION specifies a segment of audio data which (in the context of e-learning) can be narration – a word, a phrase, a sentence, or some other meaningful unit of information. Regions are of variable length and usually align to the duration of the instructional event they are associated with. Audio editors like Sound Forge enable you to divide a sound file into different regions with specific start and end points (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Regions in Sound Forge

Unlike Presenter, Captivate cannot read markers, so to import audio into the application, you must first process the audio file so that it can be readily added to each component of your e-learning content by extracting smaller sound files from the master file (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 Extracted Regions

Once extracted, the files are ready to be imported into Captivate. At this point in the process, I expected to be able to add the folder containing my extracted files to Captivate 4. However, this happened:

… so the rest of this process was completed in Captivate 2.

Note: I attempted a range of activities to work around the error message – I won’t bore you with the details here – but I had no success in circumventing the issue. Not good. For Adobe Captivate.

Without the facility to import the files via the library feature in Captivate 4, I reverted to the process of manually importing each audio file as prescribed in Captivate 2 (see demo, below). While this is a tedious process, it is still much faster than recording and editing content directly into Captivate, for the simple reason that Captivate is a content authoring tool, not a dedicated audio editor.

I read somewhere recently that if you walk around with a hammer, pretty soon everything looks like a nail; when creating e-learning content it’s very much a case of using the right tool for the right job to save yourself time and effort.

You Try:

To create and extract regions in Sound Forge:

Open Sound Forge. From the File menu, select Open… -> [yourFile.wav]

Ensure the file’s audio markers are preserved as intended from last time.

Now, from the Special menu, choose Regions List -> Markers to Regions.

All existing markers will be converted to regions using the data between each consecutive marker as the region boundary. For example, if your file contains three markers, this command will create two regions; the first region will span the area between the first and second markers, and the second region will span the area between the second and third markers.

Next, from the Tools menu, choose Extract Regions to create new files from regions in the Regions List.

The regions will be extracted to a directory on your computer.

 

Next time: Back to mobile learning. Delivering e-learning via a range of instructional modalities using m-learning.

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References:

Baddeley, A.D.; G.J. Hitch (1974), "Working Memory", in Bower, G.A., The psychology of learning and motivation: advances in research and theory, 8, New York: Academic Press, pp. 47-89

Colvin Clark, R.  Mayer, R. E. (2002). e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning. Pfieffer.

Mayer, R. E. (2001). Multimedia learning. New York: Cambridge University Press

Paivio, A. (1971). Imagery and verbal processes. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

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