Volume 1, Issue 1--Special Inaugural Issue

January 2009

  The ARDLAN

 
Online Newsletter for Arkansas Distance Learning

Online Video Tutorials for Faculty Training
by Kate M. Burkes

Northwest Arkansas Community College offers distance learning classes using compressed video and online courses. Our small Distance Learning Department provides faculty and student support for both of these technologies, although our online courses definitely require the most “hands-on” portion of our efforts.

In the Fall of 2007, we decided to develop a set of flash video tutorials to help faculty in the most common tasks of developing and maintaining an online course. We did this using Camtasia Studio, a relatively inexpensive screen-capture software from Techsmith. Since then, we have come across the free CamStudio and Jing which might have provided sufficient functionality for a project like ours.

Our objective was to produce a step-by-step “how-to” series, so we began by developing a list of topics for which we received the most support requests from faculty. We also surveyed the faculty to get a feel for their perceived needs for training, and gleaned a few additional topics from their input. The list was distilled down to 13 short topics that could be covered in less than 8 minutes of recording time.

We developed a script for each of the topics, which turned out to be a very important part of the process. We had to be very careful to explicitly cover all the pitfalls associated with each area, especially in light of the older version of the content management system (CMS) we are using. Again, our list of the most common support requests was key in highlighting all the items that needed to be featured in each video.

We decided to use voice narration with the videos, believing that faculty would recall more of the information if they heard it explained. One of the most important parts of doing the voice narration was finding someone who had good voice quality and the ability to read a script using a natural-sounding style. Fortunately, our college has a former radio DJ on staff who agreed to do the audio. He used Audacity, a popular freeware program that can record in several common audio formats, including MP3.

Before we could capture the video shots, we had to develop a shell course in the CMS that could be used to illustrate our tutorials. We also developed a standard graphic logo that could be used for the opening and closing screens, using the callout feature of Camtasia to insert a title over the logo for each segment.

Doing the screen capture with Camtasia turned out to be one of the easiest parts of the project, once we mastered a few basic techniques. The first was to be sure to capture enough video, especially shots in which nothing was moving on the screen. Since the audio would have to be imported and synced to the video, having more video than audio allowed us to cut out the extra instead of trying to stretch a video frame to cover the audio. Having plenty of static video shots also ensured that we could cut and paste without having to worry about cutting off mouse movements in awkward places.

Syncing the video and audio turned out to be the most time consuming part of the project. After recording the screen video and importing the audio file into Camtasia, we found the best way to sync everything was to slice the audio into segments before matching it to the video. We then added callouts to place words on the screen emphasizing key points of the narration. The video itself was sliced as little as possible, since we discovered that callouts would not easily cross the boundaries between video segments. Transitions were also added as needed.
For all the segments, we chose an 800 x 600 size for the final video display. We ended up producing most of the segments as SWF flash movies, which provided the smallest file size. We also discovered that movies above five minutes in length could only be produced in FLV format, which resulted in a significantly larger size. For example, a 3 minute SWF had a 5 MB size, while a 7 minute FLV was 22 MB.  Once finished, the segments were posted to our distance learning website, along with the text script for ADA compliance.

Overall, it took about 20 hours to develop five-minutes of narrated tutorial. However, this turned out to be well worth it due to the time saved answering the same support questions over and over again. We even developed another set of video tutorials for students, which many of our instructors have incorporated into their online classes as required viewing.

About the Author

Kate M. Burkes has worked in distance education for several years, both as an instructional designer and instructor. She is currently the Interim Director of Distance Learning at NorthWest Arkansas Community College. She received a Ph.D. in Applied Technology, Training, and Development from the University of North Texas, and lives in Bentonville with her two children and three “fur-kids.”

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