How Much Narration in eLearning? Our Lessons Learned

Howmuch audio narration should we use in our eLearning courses? Are weusing the right narrators? How good does the quality have to be? Dowe have the right equipment?

Theseare questions our three-person, internal eLearning team recentlyasked ourselves. We want to share our findings.

Whenour company first began using asynchronous eLearning about sevenyears ago, we used text and graphics only, no narration. Then weused audio sparingly, only enough to give a personal “voice” tocharacters in a workplace harassment prevention course.

Thenabout four years ago we received a mandate to develop a substantialamount of online compliance training. This would have been noproblem, except that we had to ensure each employee met a prescribedminimum contact time. The only way we knew how to do this at thetime was by using fully narrated screens, combined with deactivatingeach screen’s next button until “audio complete.”

Thiswas not an ideal learning method, and full narration presented otherchallenges. We couldn’t afford paid talent, so we used employees. This added more challenges, such as finding suitable speakers,getting on their calendars, and matching audio quality of updates.

Sorecently we stepped back to examine how we wanted to use narrationgoing forward.

Howmuch narration?

Westarted by doing some informal research with industry cohorts andemployees. How much narration should be used? Several eLearning gurussaid they use little to no narration unless there is a bona fideinstructional reason to do so such as augmenting online transactionprocessing with narration.

Wefound that providers of audio services and equipment favored a muchhigher use of audio than did our instructional design counterparts.

Wewanted to know the preferences of our employees so we conducted asurvey. Theyalmost unanimously said that 1) they do not want the entire course tobe narrated, 2) they do not want text on the screen read to them wordfor word, and 3) about two-thirds of the employees want to be able toturn the narration on or off.

Whoshould narrate?

Ourindustry sources all say that, if there is a narrator, the higher thequality of the narrator’s voice the better. We took this as astrong preference for professional voice talent.

However,our employees had a different view. Only 12% said they preferprofessional voice talent. A full 85% said the voice only needs tosound good enough to get the point across without having to strain tounderstand it. Nearly 60% of our employees said “no preference”as long as the voice isn’t irritating to listen to. 40% preferthat the narrator be someone they recognize (i.e., a well-knownmanager, process owner, or SME). A surprising 9% said the narrationcould be computer-generated as long as it didn’t sound toorobot-like. (We will report on our text-to-speech findings in ournext article.)

Howgood does it need to be?

In addition to thenarrators’ voice quality, what about the quality of the audiooutput itself? We considered upgrading the quality as much as wecould. We looked at better microphones and became acquainted withDigital Audio Workstations, or DAWs. But then we realized that thecost and learning curve of these devices was not warranted becausethe audio will get compressed anyway, and because of feedback fromour employees. We ended up simply getting a better microphone (about$150) and controlling the recording environment more.

Our new guidelines

Here are theguidelines we have adopted as a result of this study:

1. [How much?] We will use audio only when instructionally necessary.

2. [Control] We will make sure students have the ability to turn the sound on and off, and that they know how to do so.

3. [Who?] We will continue to use in-house talent, but other than credits at the end, we will not identify the narrator unless his or her name or title is pertinent for the instruction, e.g., having the Compliance Officer introduce a compliance course. This will prevent having to re-narrate when someone changes position or leaves the company. We may audition to get more suitable voices.

4. [Quality] We only need slightly a higher quality microphone along with a pop filter to raise our technical quality to the practical limit. We also identified a storage room that will double as our sound studio with the use of inexpensive draperies. This location should improve our ability to splice in updates without sounding noticeably different from the original.

5. We will continue to have learners evaluate the use and quality of our narration and make adjustments accordingly.

References and web sites consulted

“Addicted to Audio?” Cathy Moore, Posted in Audio, Human interest, Instructional design by Cathy Moore on 13 November 2007.

“Nuts and Bolts: Principles of Multimedia Learning,” Jane Bozarth, Learning Solutions Magazine (online), May 4, 2010.

Various posts on the ASTD E-Learning Discussion Board.