LITA Nashville -- Concurrent Session 5

Multimedia Tutorials for Remote Users
Christina L. Biles, Oklahoma State University

This was mostly about Camtasia-created tutorials, although she thinks Captivate is just fine, too. She also mentioned cheaper options that would also do the trick: My ScreenRecorder and InstantDemo. Someone from the audience also mentioned Wink on Linux, which is Open Source.

She can make a Camtasia tutorial so quickly that she uses it to answer reference questions. When a telephone exchange hasn’t been fully satisfactory since the patron can’t see the librarian’s screen, she makes a quick tutorial to show the process and emails it off to the patron.

Of course, one of the advantages of tutorials is that they are repeatable, so rather than explain over and over again how to set up the proxy, record the instructions as a tutorial. Then future users can learn from the same material.

A quiet physical space is required. Although if you don’t get too good of a microphone (that picks up every single sound), it doesn’t have to be completely silent.

She suggests writing a script and reading it over until it sounds natural. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with annoying “umms” and “errrs” in the recording. She often uses someone else to move the mouse while she talks. It’s also possible to record the screen movements separately from the voice and put them together at the end.

Recording things in small chunks has a number of advantages. It’s easier in the software to string small things together into a larger piece than it is to go the other way around. Small pieces can be mixed and matched. People seem to prefer smaller videos that only take a few minutes to watch. At OSU, they have found that the video tutorials are accessed more frequently than the HTML and PDF tutorials that are available on the same page.

Labels: conferences, instruction, screencasting

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