Shooting Video for E-Learning Use – eLearning Guild

I recently posted on integrating audio with e-learning authoring tools, and in the near future, I’ll be covering some aspects of the visual aspects of creating e-learning content, focusing on creating video for application demonstrations and using still imagery in e-learning.

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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Adding E-Learning Presentations to Blackboard

Today’s Question: how do you turn this:

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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