Audio Challenges in eLearning
Using audio in your eLearning can be an effective way to teach complex learning concepts to your learners and improve the overall learning experience for your course. Audio in eLearning is effective as it can be used for a variety of purposes from teaching learning content to providing instructions on what your learner needs to do next. When creating audio for your eLearning there are a number of things to consider such as the length of the script, the tone of the audio and what type of course you want to be portrayed, is it formal business training? is it more informal?
In comparison to video the costs and time associated with creating audio is much lower, when compared to text it is much less static and can be used to explain detailed subjects, however it is important to note that audio can have challenges, below are some of the audio challenges you might experience when creating audio for your next course.
1. Quality
Bad audio quality can be a big issue for your eLearning course, if the audio quality is bad it can be a very big distraction for your learner. Learners will be taking training on a wide variety of devices and equipment, if the audio quality for your course is poor it could be difficult for your learners to understand what is being taught to them. When creating audio it is important that you use high quality equipment and record in a quiet environment to ensure you get a crisp and clear voice recording for your course.
2. Changes
Changes to audio can be time consuming depending on the amount of changes and what is being changed. When compared to video there is less work in changing audio, however this can still take considerable time. When making changes to audio it is not always as simple as cutting out and dropping in new words, sometimes words are said to closely together resulting in it not being possible to edit, in this case a rerecording would need to take place. When deciding on audio it is important to try and make the script as close to the desired content as possible, this way you can reduce the amount of time needed in rerecords.
3. Synchronising Audio
Often audio will be used to sync with things on-screen, this might be an animations, text or images that appear on-screen when a certain part of the audio plays. When developing eLearning this is often done using a timeline, a timeline is used to determine when objects such as text or images appear on-screen. If a change is made to the audio such as a new line being added this will affect the timings of when things appear on screen, things that were once appearing at the correct time now appear too early. Synchronisation can be a long process so it is important to remember this when making changes to your audio after objects have been synchronised.
