I will outline the technical aspects of creating, recording, producing, and distributing podcasts at a later time, but for now, I want to investigate some aspects of audio delivered via podcast as a learning channel.

The greatest advantage of the sound medium lies in its direct appeal to the imagination. There is a (probably apocryphal) story told that a child once said they liked radio better than TV ‘because there are better pictures on the radio’. The sound ‘pictures’ are better because they are built in the mind and imagination of the user. If done correctly, ideas and meaning can be conjured up in sound as easily as a software simulation demonstrates the steps involved in formatting a spreadsheet…

…well, perhaps not quite so easily. Sound demands a greater contribution from the learner than visually presented material. To compel this involvement – and to deserve it – the material emerging from a loudspeaker must maintain a high level of interest throughout. If it drops for one moment, the imagination is turned off like a light and all real communication is lost. However, there are many ways to stimulate the imagination: to some extent, they depend on form, and to some extent they depend on studio and recording technique. Apart from this, what is done is a matter for individual judgment and intuition.

In the analysis of any podcast, we should probably take interest as our starting point, because the one factor that all successful podcasts have in common is their ability to engage and retain the audience’s interest. Gauging interest depends on our previous life experiences: we know what we like; what we’re not motivated to care about leaves us relatively indifferent – very few people are interested in subjects that cannot be explained in terms of concepts that are already understood.

In this context, a podcast presents a learning stimulus, guides knowledge acquisition or learning through example, and elicits understanding. As such a podcast is a practical example of Bruner’s concept of instructional scaffolding – the learner’s current level of knowledge can be described as an edifice that represents their cognitive abilities. Mayes and de Freitas (2005) describe the scaffolding as “a means of exploiting the ZPD” (p.19). The cognitive scaffold surrounds what is already known and can be done. The new is built on top of the known as the learner develops, and over time the supports can be removed as the learner can independently actualize the knowledge, behavior or skill. Each new learned knowledge or asset becomes a level in the learner’s constructed schema and this becomes the foundation for extending the learner’s ongoing development.

When we listen to somebody talking, we soon forget such relatively superficial qualities as accent and voice timbre (unless we are forcibly reminded of them at any point); we do not listen closely to the actual words, but go straight to the meaning – we forget the words almost as soon as they are spoken, the meaning we may retain. This meaning, together with its associations in the audience’s mind (through visual, memory association or other means) forms an image that may be concrete, abstract, or a mixture of the two. If it is possible to present a subject in such terms, a considerable amount has been achieved in enabling the audience to learn for the podcast.

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 (in Part 5) a very cool sound collage to set the scene for the outbreak of World War 2 in September 1939.

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.

In Part 3 of Transatlantic: The Flying Boats of Foynes:

On the 4th of July 1937, the Pan American flying boat Yankee Clipper inaugurated the west-east part of the transatlantic air route with Foynes as the fulcrum of the New York – Lisbon flight.

Chief Operator of Morse Code & Semaphore Frank Buckley describes the sight of Pan American Captain Harold Gray’s Boeing B-314 Clipper arriving for the first time in Foynes, Ireland.

We get a sense of the glamour and the whiff of danger for passengers undertaking the still-difficult journey from one side of the Atlantic Ocean to the other.

We tell the story of the invention of Irish Coffee.

Click here to listen.

As one of the contributors in the podcast has quite a noticeable regional accent, I’ve included a transcript for the podcast – indeed, some people may find using their visual as well as their audio register is a more satisfying experience. Click here to view the transcript of this podcast (PDF, 30K).

Does this format work for podcasting in your view? Have I managed to elicit interest in the subject matter. As a listener, are you motivated to find out more, by retrieving Episodes 1 & 2 or by subscribing to the series? Let me know what you think.
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References:

Bates, A. W. (1984). Broadcasting in education: an evaluation. London: Croom Helm

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

de Freitas, S. & Mayes, T. (2005). JISC e-Learning Models Desk Study Stage 2: Review of e learning theories, frameworks and models. [Online] London, JISC. Available from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Stage%202%20Learning%20Models%20(Version%201).pdf [Accessed 15th January 2007]

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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.

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Given the number of responses to the E-Learning Demo comparison articles, I have decided to combine them and make them available to all as a downloadable whitepaper (PDF format) so that the review can be read in one easily-accessible document.

Click here read the review in a new browser window, or right-click and Save As… to download a copy of the paper to your PC or Mac. You will need Adobe Reader to view the file. Click here to download Adobe Reader 9.

My final thought for today: I put a lot of time and effort into writing (hopefully)  useful, informative and stimulating material for this e-learning blog. Being a learning and development professional, the posts I find most satisfying to write concern the reasons people want to learn, the theories and approaches that support learning, and how best to enable learners to acquire knowledge. I guess I have to admit that sometimes I forget that maybe the practical ‘just-in-time’ material is as important as the more esoteric material. In future, I’ll certainly add more posts concerning the practical elements of e-learning development, deployment and delivery into the mix.

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in to this?

You have to read the blog post to find out.

Now read on…

If you’ve read The E-Learning Curve Blog recently, you’ll know that I have been creating quite a number of demos over the last seven weeks or so. Undertaking this activity has inspired me to write about some “back to basics” e-learning topics (including my recent evaluation of Camtasia and Captivate), and today I’m going to address the question “OK, I have my content, how do I upload it to an LMS?”

But first a (sort of) digression…

I facilitated a conference on Third-Level Distance Education and E-learning in late 2008. We covered many topics during the proceedings, including

• Online Teaching and Learning
• The Economics of E-Learning
• Assessment in On-line Education 
• Impact of E-learning

Now don’t get me wrong – all of the above are highly interesting and useful topics, and I’ll talk ‘til the cows come home on any or all of them. My favorite part of these events however, is where I introduce and guide the audience through some hands-on e-learning content generation using any one of a number of content authoring tools.

To show (sometimes skeptical) participants just how easy it is to do this, I present a two-hour workshop called How to Create E-learning in Just Four Mouse Clicks (‘Four Clicks’ for short, in honor of the similarly-named Led Zeppelin song) …and as this is the digression I’m not going to elaborate any further on the Four Clicks workshop.

So digression over: once you have your e-learning content, what next? Well, you can always play it from your PC or Mac of course, but what you really need to do is load it into an environment where the audience can access it, which means placing the content on a Learning Management System (LMS) like one of the flavors of Blackboard.

Uploading content to an LMS is easy, but it’s not intuitive. Computers are obvious and logical. The logical and obvious approach is to pick through all of the ShockWave Flash (SWF) files, find the largest one (because that contains the content – right?) and use the Browse feature of your LMS to upload the content.

This inevitably ends in failure, because there’s more to distributing learning materials online that just the content (I’ll talk about IMS manifests, specifications and metadata in the future). In fact, the process is quite straight-forward, and I could outline the steps here – that was the original intent of today’s post, but on reflection, I considered that it would probably be more useful if I created a PDF “How To” guide that you could download and keep close in your “My Useful E-Learning Stuff” directory on your local drive, to pull out when you need it, rather than trying to find the instructions buried in a blog entry.

For the purposes of this document, the presentation is created in Adobe Presenter, and was uploaded to Blackboard, but the process is common across most authoring tools and delivery platforms.

Click here to open the Adding Adobe Presenter presentations to Blackboard PDF (requires Adobe Reader).

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Finally, Adobe have recognized that like graphics, DTP, and digital / video media production, e-learning is a significant market vertical for their applications, and have released the Adobe eLearning Suite (eLS). According to their website, eLearning Suite

…software integrates best-of-breed tools for rapid eLearning, courseware authoring, simulations, and media editing. Create rich, interactive learning experiences that engage audiences with video,  audio, and powerful visuals. Work productively with rapid authoring tools that deliver smart collaboration features as well as tight integration with asset-creation tools. And deliver content to the web, the desktop, mobile devices, and Learning Management Systems.

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

Quite impressive – if I was starting work today and I was handed this set of applications as my content development toolkit, I would be very happy indeed. Similarly, as you can see from Figure 1 (below) the Suite’s workflow plays to the strengths of the individual applications. I would assert that this workflow is industry-standard practice, as already implemented by most e-learning developers worth their fee, so no surprises there.  

Figure 1. eLS workflow

However, where I think Adobe missed a trick is that they should have released this (or a similar) 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. 

Think of the opportunity they had to build a loyal and growing customer- and user base if they had released this suite in 2002, and you’ll realize what they let slip through their corporate fingers. As stands, learning professionals in the past had to build their own toolkits: at this stage I’m not going to change from SoundForge  to Soundbooth, for example, or from DocBookXML and XXE to Acrobat Pro – but I will of course keep using Captivate, Flash and Dreamweaver.

So 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.

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In my previous posting, I discussed the two applications’ user interfaces and audio capabilities. Today, I will look at workflow and usability.

Captivate Usability

Captivate offers three customizable capture presets – demonstrations, assessment simulations, and training simulations. If you choose an assessment simulation, Captivate won’t capture mouse movements that highlight boxes, or text captions that would tell the learner how to proceed in the assessment. In demonstration mode, Captivate doesn’t include Click boxes, since it assumes that the audience is passively viewing the content.

As mentioned last time, Captivate uses an object-orientated paradigm to develop content. As such, events and interactions are captured as a series of screens. In edit mode, the content author can flexibly create new screens, import content (in a number of formats including AVI, PPT, and FLV), change the sequence of events, and delete unused content. As you can see from Figure 1, the edit tab look-and-feel is a combination of the Macromedia / Adobe Unified User Interface and Microsoft PowerPoint: this indicates to me that Adobe are targeting users familiar with developing content in the latter program as their core market for Captivate.

Figure 1. Detailed view of the Captivate UI.

[Click here to view larger image]

In this context, the UI works very well indeed; you can actually create a PowerPoint presentation in it’s native format, import it to Captivate, enhance it with motion-based media, animations, quizzes, and audio narration, and generate a learning object with ease. The inclusion of a timeline at the center-top of the UI is reminiscent of Flash and Director, so users familiar with these authoring tools can transition to Captivate-based content creation. The timeline also contains the vector-based mouse layer, which enables the modification of the mouse motion track in a demo or slide,

Compared to Camtasia, Captivate captures a broader range of text and interactive elements. The author can also add Text Entry boxes, clickable buttons, animations and text animations. Once an element is added to the timeline, it can be lengthened, reduced, and repositioned, which allows for a high level of precision – count on spending plenty of time tweaking the automatically captured elements to get the timing right.

Camtasia’s Usability

If you’ve ever used Windows Movie Maker, you will be familiar with the Camtasia Studio UI. The interface is based on the video editing suite paradigm and includes all the common features of this editing environment – a preview window, a timeline where edits are made, a clip bin, and effects (cross fade, contrast/brightness etc) controls. Since Camtasia captures all mouse and screen events, it’s perfect for developing process flows, hot to’s and application demonstrations. Camtasia does not automatically generate onscreen text media like callouts, but they can be added manually in post-production. As with Captivate, TechSmith’s program allows for very precise location of callouts and highlights. Similarly Flash Hot Spots—callouts with additional Flash properties— can be included – though you have to render the entire project to view their operation, which is a nuisance (Captivate facilitates a single frame, five frame, or entire movie preview which is great for testing interactive functionality). It is possible to add quizzes in Camtasia, but the results are not scored as they are in Captivate.

Conclusions
And so this is where I came in: I still don’t know which application I prefer. Used together as part of your e-learning content development toolkit, the applications will provide   you with the ability to cover most (if not all) e-learning development eventualities. Because of my own professional background in digital media development, I feel more at home using Camtasia, but that does not mean that it’s better at what it does. In terms of Camtasia’s advantages I could highlight the better digital media manipulation, sophisticated features like zoom-and-pan, and wider range of output formats that Captivate just can’t match. On the other hand, Captivate is much more capable and easier to use when creating assessments and simulations, especially with its ability to preview Click Boxes and other user input in Preview mode.

A comment contributor to the E-Learning Curve Blog called rjnagle was kind enough to share their experience of the apps with me:

Captivate has lots of quirks that take getting used to. I haven’t used the elearning capabilities, only the demo capabilities.

First, the html output consists of several swf files, several of whom reference the other. It can be troublesome to put on a website.

Some basic editing features end up taking a lot of time. (for example, I’ve never figured out how to crop the beginning of an animation, only the end). I notice that sometimes when you impose text it will append dead time at the end.

I wish there were a way to speed up the animation time so that it plays more rapidly.

Also, despite the claims of the documentation, you simply can’t attach more than one slide to an audio clip. It causes lots of problems.

I do like the fact you can import slides from other projects into the current one.
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They go on:

I have been disillusioned about Captivate, but once I recognize what it does well, I can manage.

The problem is that on the job you typically are able to choose one or the other, not both.

As I said when I began this series, each program has uniquely excellent functionality.

In the context of my contributor rjnagle, I would have to suggest that if your requirements center on demo development (and not e-learning), Camtasia Studio is the better tool. As for me? Well… I would assert that (for the moment) both tools are essential. Once you become familiar with their strengths, weaknesses, and quirks, it is hard to imagine working without either one. 

____________

Find Out More:

Adobe Captivate Homepage

TechSmith Camtasia Studio Homepage

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Now read on…

Writing this review has proven to be a much more difficult (and time-consuming) task that I had anticipated it would be; in fact, I can say that I experience a mild cognitive dissonance whenever I’m asked the question “which do you prefer (or recommend): Camtasia or Captivate?”

The answer is I don’t know. Or more accurately, I still don’t know. More on this later. Like most people (in any industry) I tend to have a single ‘weapon of choice’ for each task I undertake. Last weekend I spent some time doing some DIY around the house for example, and despite owning many screwdrivers, I always return to my trusty old Stanley DynaGrip 10, pretty much regardless of the gluing and screwing job I’m doing. Similarly when I post-produce video I use one editor – Vegas Video, when I edit audio the files are authored in SoundForge, and I use DreamWeaver to do 95% of my HTML and website- related production. But when it comes to authoring demos? Well… there I have a problem. Inevitably I run mentally run through the dialog that I am about to share with you, dear reader.

Adobe Captivate and TechSmith Camtasia Studio are similar e-learning content development tools with uniquely different strong points. If you’re creating a software demo, or a PowerPoint presentation to deliver online, Camtasia is a better application; conversely, if you’re making interactive web-based training, or a complex software demonstration, Captivate is superior is definitely the tool for the task.

Even where their functionality converges, their operating procedures and user interface are so different that each will probably appeal to different users. If (like me) your background is in media production, you’ll find Camtasia easy to learn and use, and Captivate frustrating. On the other hand, if you’re used to authoring content in PowerPoint, you’ll find Camtasia a strange, and Captivate more intuitive and fit-for-purpose.

Figure 1. Captivate UI (above), Camtasia UI (below).

[Click image to enlarge]

Beyond these, however, are certain functions at which one product excels and the other either doesn’t perform or performs quite poorly. For example, Camtasia excels at capturing streaming video content, which Captivate cannot do. If you need to ‘pan and scan’ a close-up of a screen element of the content that you’ve captured, Camtasia is your only choice. However, the reverse pertains if you’re creating a quiz – Captivate offers a much richer toolset. Similarly Captivate’s ability to generate Word or PDF versions of files for hardcopy distribution is a fantastic timesaver.

Indeed, the more you use both tools, the more you begin to realize that if you’re authoring a range of e-learning, demonstration, and presentation projects, you probably really need both .

Using Camtasia
Like most screen-capture utilities, Camtasia captures a video of the screen as you interact with it, with added audio if you enable narration, as well as Picture-in-Picture (PIP) video if you add a webcam. The resultant CAMREC output file is a recording of all of the audio, video and interaction elements. In editing mode, Camtasia enables the addition of multiple tracks for captions, breakout boxes, callouts, PIP, quizzes, and so on.

Using Captivate
Captivate works differently. Rather than capturing one multiplexed file, Captivate captures the user’s interactions as a series of screens, each containing one mouse click and movement. Very much like its progenitor Flash, Captivate stores each object of each captured screen as a separate element. As with Camtasia, you may add additional content enhancements – 508-compliant closed captioning, callouts, quizzes, etc in post-production.

Audio
Both applications enable the author to either record audio narration in real time during capture time, or import MP3 or WAV audio in post-production. In my experience, Captivate audio recorded in real time loses synchronization over the duration of the recording: this becomes especially noticeable in 20-minute-plus recordings and can be very frustrating to remediate. However you can add post-content captured audio slide by slide (tedious), or by importing a completed audio file. A very neat feature of Captivate is that it recognizes audio markers, so if you include these in your WAV or MP3 file, it will synchronize with the slides in the presentation. I have also noticed that the audio generated by Captivate can be pretty ropey (even though it’s MP3 format) – in fact, at some of the lower sample- and bit rates, it reminds me of the horrible .VOX format I had to use in my Authorware days, back in the last century.

In my view, Camtasia Studio provides a much more easy-to-use and intuitive audio recording and editing experience. The fact that you can see all the audio on a timeline layer means that you can see how the audio fits in context with the whole presentation’s ‘big picture.’ The ability to split audio and move it around the timeline is an added bonus. Similarly, I feel that the audio enhancement features – normalization, noise reduction (NR) and so on – are easier to preview and use in Camtasia. In terms of outputs, there no end to your choice of formats – MP3, WAV, and WMA. The facility to render podcast-formatted audio is a very cool feature that Captivate just can’t compete with.

This concludes this part of my head-to-head review.

Next time: Video editing, content rendering, and my conclusions.

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