Tom Kuhlmann has posted a thought-provoking demo that shows four ways to approach narrating a course.
The first three slides use some sort of narrated text. The final slide shows the best approach for that content, which is narration with visuals and no text.
My concern is that many people assume that narration is best for all content. However, research suggests that narration should be used only in certain situations.
I’ve included a Flash showing what I mean. It’s a big one, thanks to the audio, so out of pity for email subscribers I’ve linked it instead of embedding it. Click the image to launch the Flash.
Visuals + audio = persuasion
I think the Flash shows how a strong visual with narration can emphasize an important point (I’m thinking of the marionette in particular).
Text + silence = learner control
But most of our courses include information, not just persuasion. And that information is best presented in a way that gives the learner control. That includes a menu (notably lacking in my Flash) and text that the learner can read quickly, slowly, or not at all.
Narration narrows cultural appeal
Also, narration puts a cultural stamp on your materials. A Flash that could be global gets a blatant “Made in America” label when I narrate it.
There have been many comments on my previous post about this issue, and there are lots of comments on Tom’s post. What do you think? When is narration good, and when is it not so good?
So much for my post next week:) Good points on user control. That’s one of the reasons I like the scrub bar in Presenter. The trick is to find the right balance…and the right approach for the project.
Personally, I like to read through the transcript, rather than hear the audio. I also like to jump around and get highlights (good reason for menu) to get a sense of what the course will cover.
The worst case is someone locking down the navigation and then reading the text to me real slow (because, you know, we only have an 8th grade education). The experience is equitable to sitting in a cannibal’s pot waiting for the water to boil.
I’m also a transcript reader. Accessibility rules help everyone!
Another argument for silent text is that it’s a lot cheaper to produce. If we use narration only for persuasive pitches, complex graphics, and dramatic scenes, we’ll have more time and money available to develop realistic interactions that will help learners apply their new skills to their jobs.
I would rather hear some presentations and multitask rather than read it myself. Of course it depends on the author and topic. These short texts are fine but anything longer and I am turned off. We don’t read the TV news which is what I prefer. While others prefer to skim the paper and read what they want. I think a well designed combination depending on use or need is the best.
I think, that if we want to be learner centric, the choice must be left to the learner as to wether they will listen or read to a presentation. For auditory learners, narration will do more good than a page turner. On the other side, visual learners might prefer reading the explanations. You must also provide some sort of interaction for kinestaetics learners.
Tools like Articulate Presenter and others allow to offer choices to learners. Audio can be muted and spakers notes can be displayed. You can even attached a PDF version for those who do not like to read on a screen or want to read it on the bus. Of course the more options the more expensive it gets, but with with most rapid elearning tools it is possible to produce these different type of presentation quickly at reasonable cost.
In the end, the designer has to decide what the learner will learn and let the learner decide how he or she will learn it.
Thanks for the post, Cathy!
As a writer, old habits can be hard to break. I’ve gotten very adept at writing the “telling part” of a script — back from the days when we had audio/video narrating text on almost every single page. This was to meet the “learning styles” argument that Guy mentions. And the first step in the eLearning maturation process — moving from classroom to eLearning (the instructor tells in a classroom, why shouldn’t the instructor tell in eLearning?)
As a result, I’ve written a lot of boring courses.
It takes a lot more creativity and thoughtful effort to effectively show content through good graphics and interactivity.
To Jane’s comment, I would suggest that perhaps the presentations that she’d rather listen to while multitasking would be best if they were produced as podcasts.
Guy, that’s a very good point about being learner centric and if possible letting learners follow their preferences.
If we use audio, it’s good to provide a transcript so people who prefer to read can read it. Also, if our materials currently use lots of on-screen text, it would be helpful to provide an audio-only version without the redundant text, such as a podcast.
Unfortunately, a common approach in US courses I’ve seen is to do both at once and read the on-screen text to the learner, which research has shown hurts learning (see Mayer, Clark et al. in Efficiency in Learning, Elearning and the Science of Instruction, etc.).
Since our budgets are limited, we usually can’t provide 2 or 3 versions of the same material. One compromise (and a good approach to design) is to use multiple modes throughout the material–just not simultaneously. We can cover some content with audio, another with silent text, etc., choosing the mode that works best for that content, which is what I was hoping to suggest in the demo.
People interested in a skeptical view of learning styles might want to see “There is no such thing as learning styles” at http://tinyurl.com/2dceq2 and Will Thalheimer’s challenge to the elearning industry: http://www.willatworklearning.com/2007/08/learning-styles.html.
Cammy, I agree it’s a lot easier & quicker to simply tell learners what they need to know. I think that old model of “teacher pours knowledge into the empty heads of students” still has a lot of power over us!
One idea I’d like to explore in future posts is the temptation to put information in a course that would really be more useful in a job aid. Some of the stuff we may be telling learners in a course might be perfectly appropriate for straightforward telling, but in a job aid.
Hi Cathy,
Great work as usual! One point I wanted to touch on was your idea of the “one compromise (and a good approach to design) is to use multiple modes throughout the material–just not simultaneously”. In my experience this can confuse users as some screens contain audio while others don’t. They may be sitting on a page waiting for the audio to download while in fact there is none. In the end it is a compromise that may add some confusion, but as you mention budgets and time is limited. Do you any good strategies for combatting the confusion?
Again, great thought provoking work!
Quintus.
Quintus, thanks for your comments, and I’m glad you liked the post.
Have you tried using audio just with visuals (without redundant text)? Maybe learners could get used to the idea that a page that has text on it won’t have audio, and a page that has no text will have audio. This assumes that we’re talking about a small-screen Flash course like the ones produced by many rapid development tools.
I usually prefer to use standard-sized web pages that combine HTML text with embedded Flashes (much like this blog). With this approach, it’s obvious that no one is going to read the text to you, and the audio happens only when you click on something special.
You could also use a small “there’s audio!” icon, like a speaker, that appears when audio is playing. Another cue could be the transcript button, if you’re providing transcripts.
Does anyone else have any ideas?
Hmmm…I think Quintus brings up a good point and it’s one I’m struggling with right now as I’m writing — the jumping a bit from modality to modality.
I like Cathy’s idea of a “there’s audio!” icon. This is more obvious than the subtle rule that if there’s text there’s no audio, to which there may be exceptions. For example, you may want to use audio with a few key text words popping in on the screen for emphasis.
Here I am commenting on my own blog, but I think I would have done well to mention another option, that of the self-explanatory graphic. As is probably obvious from this blog, I like pictures. I don’t want to imply that I think elearning should be text-only to give the learner the most control. The learner also has perfect control over pictures, rollover explorations of graphics, and all other types of illustrations that don’t require lengthy narration. In fact, it’s a cool challenge to say as much as you can through the graphics and use as little text as possible.
Cathy, thanks for your interesting post and for everyone’s instructive comments.
Since you invited people’s ideas I’ll give you my two cents:
The great advantage of audio is that you can convey much more information to the learner per slide than you can by on-screen text. 50 words of narration about an screen object is not that much, whereas putting those same words in a balloon would quickly use up the real estate on the slide.
For flexible learning, the spoken text/transcript should be optionally displayed as small subtitles/speaker notes at the bottom for those who want to read along so as not to miss anything, or, as was suggested, to optionally mute the audio and just read the subtitles to gain speed.
Following Cathy’s suggestion of “complex graphics” as a guideline, I think that whenever you have three or more objects – text or graphic – on the slide, you will want to have the audio explanation and exposition of those objects – with the audio synched, for example, with the objects’ animations so you know which object the narration is talking about.
So you should know this is not just talk, we have implemented these suggestions in our product Speech-Over Studio (www.speechover.com), which uses text-to-speech voices to narrate ppts according to text input. This method overcomes the cost of narration problem that Cathy referred to as well as the cultural constraint since the voices come in different languages and dialects.
Joel
Joel Harband
Speech-Over Studio
http://www.speechover.com
Great examples, great post. Though doing so constantly grates on me, one thing that “forces” us to use audio narration of on-screen text in my company is the low literacy level of a certain percentage of our audience. Some of them would be spending hours more on the courses (and away from their production duties) if we didn’t essentially read the course to them.
We do provide the option to turn the audio off, which is what I do.
Personally, I’m a big fan of narrated eLearning. From my perspective, if you want me to read a bunch of text, just send me a Word document or PDF already! Many of my customers seem to agree – they love our narrated Articulate stuff, they dislike our HTML text-based page-turners created in our LMS.
Being a fast reader, I hate the cumbersome nature of eLearning navigation for a text-only course. Read two paragraphs, click button. Read more two paragraphs, click button. I find myself just clicking the button to blow through the tedious thing as quickly as possible.
Why not split the difference? Provide a text document for the heavy reading, then follow it up with a narrated (and spirited) overview of the material with some learning games?
I agree that using audio narration helps the learning. I create safety trainings for schools, etc. We have tried course both ways with narration and without.
Our first round was with narration of just the slide. Although many users liked this a few did not. So our second round we tried narration that consisting of only a slide overview such as “this slide covers…”. Most of our users didn’t like that because they couldn’t be doing something else and listening to the presentation.
So now we use narration that covers the slide content and any pertinent additional information. But, does not necessarily read the slide word for word. We have received very good reviews of this approach.
We use Articulate for our trainings and attach a PDF Student Manual that gives the students the slide, any notes or additional comments, a transcript of any questions used during knowledge checks and a glossary. We find users like to have this as a reference document.
Bruce and Chris, thanks for your comments. I’m beginning to see an interesting trend here–it seems like at least some learners want to be able to multitask while they’re going through a course. For example, Janet said, “I would rather hear some presentations and multitask rather than read it myself,” and Bruce found that most of his users didn’t like limited narration “because they couldn’t be doing something else and listening to the presentation.”
I think it would be helpful to distinguish between a presentation and and interaction.
When I “attend” an online conference, I multitask during presentations. When the presenter isn’t covering something I’m really interested in, I wander off to check email or whatever while keeping an ear on the presenter. When he or she gets into something I care about, I go back to the presentation window to see the slide and start paying more attention again.
However, if the online conference presenter asks participants lots of questions and involves us in polls, I’m much less likely to multitask, and the presentation starts to move more toward an interactive workshop.
Similarly, if elearning materials mostly deliver information, they’re more like a presentation that people can tune out until the quiz at the end. If the materials frequently ask thought-provoking questions or challenge the learner to explore something on the screen, the learners are more likely to stick around. So it’s possible that the optimal use of audio and text will be different in these different applications.
I think we should mix narration and user interactivity while writing storyboards. These two are not antagonistic to each other. They should be mixed proportionately. Also, if we present narration, it is cumbersome to the learner.
I think that recent research has shown that it is desirable to add on-screen text with narration. The narration slows the users down, making them absorb more of the information. The full on-screen text then allows them to re-read after audio has ended, again, to re-inforce the information. Alot of users are visual, and are thrown off with audio’d content alone, especially with e-learning content. Studies have shown they do not retain most of the spoken text. There are also accessibility and usability rules to consider, users that might not have their audio on, and users with a hearing impairment. The best thing for e-learning content, is to have a segmented, user-driven presentation with full text on-screen, but to keep segments short, so users can skip ahead when ready.