Creating voiced-over PowerPoint videos
using a Lync telephone to record the voice
Summary
This case study offers an overview of the approach taken by Cormac Norton in the creation and dissemination of voiced over videos of his PowerPoint lecture slides.
Project Lead
Cormac Norton
School of Nursing
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
Objectives and Approach
The aim of this approach is to create audio/visual lecture notes, based on PowerPoint slide presentations, that can be used as revision materials for students. The key is in establishing a process for developing these types of resources in a way that does not require a high level of technological skill and know how, and as such can be developed without an excessive investment of time, and wherein the results are of an acceptable quality and broadly accessible to students.

To create his videos Cormac uses two particular approaches that differ from the usual way in which narrated PowerPoint presentations tend to be created and delivered in an online setting.

1. Rather than having to attach a microphone to his computer to record his voice or to use the in-built microphone, Cormac uses his Lync telephone as a microphone through which to record audio directly to a PowerPoint presentation.

This approach circumvents the process of having to source a microphone from AV services, to connect it to the computer and go through the relatively complicated procedure of setting it up so that it records audio at the correct quality on to a PowerPoint presentation.

2. He saves and disseminates his PowerPoint presentations as videos (wmv) rather than as PowerPoint files (.pptx. or .ppsx)

The usual method for creating a voiced over PowerPoint presentation results in the generation of a PowerPoint file – when this is uploaded to a Blackboard shell,  in order to open the file and access the presentation a student must have PowerPoint installed on the computer that is being used to access the presentation – which may not necessarily be the case for an ‘off campus’ computer. Whereas with this method the PowerPoint presentation is converted to a video format, which can then be uploaded to the DMU Panopto server [tell me how?], added to a Blackboard module [tell me how?] and viewed using a standard web browser – there is no need to have PowerPoint software installed to view the video.

It is in the use of these two approaches that Cormac believes leads to the production of a more effective and accessible audio/visual revision resource, and makes the process of creating such resources less onerous.

Outcomes
Cormac has noted that anecdotally students have commented on how they like having these types of narrated, audio/visual resources as revision materials, in comparison to a series of silent, standalone slides.The creation of this type of resource, using this particular approach is efficient and not particularly complicated – as such it takes little time to produce the video [this is not taking into account the initial creation of the PowerPoint presentation].

blog
CLICK HERE
to view a CELT blog post about using your Lync phone for recording audio.

CELT Case Studies
If you would like to have your eLearning practices captured and disseminated in a similar case study, please contact your Faculty ELT Project Officer

This case study was prepared by:
Rob Weale (CELT)

Date of publication: 21/8/2013