On Guerilla Design and Video

There's always the debate about whether you need to go pro for your audio and visual, or get right to the source in a down and dirty kind of way.

With easy-to-use tools at your fingertips, it's getting cheaper and faster to go guerilla style and get the subject matter expert speaking directly to your audience in a matter of moments. Skype, phone lines, iPhones/iPods, video cameras, etc. User generated content gets easier to generate by the minute.

"Even the most popular YouTube videos may totally fail the standard Hollywood definition of production quality, in that videos are low-resolution and badly lit, their sound quality awful and their plots nonexistent. But none of that matters, because the most important thing is relevance. We'll always choose a "low-quality" video of something we actually want over a "high-quality" video of something we don't."

Chris Anderson, Free, p. 194.






I've blogged before about going guerilla with audio. Audio in eLearning: When Rough Around the Edges is Better.

This morning, Dick Carlson's posted a link to this session being offered tonight in South Carolina: Gonzo Video - Why Less is More, Worse is Better, And Shaky is Believable. Drive on down if you're close by and learn a thing or two!

Audio in eLearning: When Rough Around the Edges is Better

At our seminar today on using Articulate and Moodle and "Doing More for Less", the conversation turned (as it always does) to using audio in eLearning. One of the participants talked about a focus group/research project his organization did.

I don't have the specifics and I'll try to track him down to find out more because the results were fascinating. For now, this is all heresay.

Here's what I recall:

They created a set of powerpoint slides. (Perhaps the subject matter expert had created them?) Let's just say, a set of slide were created by someone.

They had the SME record the audio for the slides. I'm not sure if the SME was reading a script, reading the notes, or just speaking from the heart.

So that's one version.

Next, they had a 'professional' clean up the SME's transcript, cut out the ums and ahs and record it 'professionally'.

So that's the second version.

So you've got one version that's pretty rough around the edges and one version that's smooth and polished. They piloted these two versions and got feedback.

Something like 60-70% of the learners preferred the rough version, created by the expert. They said it "sounded more real" and they trusted it more because they knew this person was talking from experience.

So here's to more guerilla audio recording!

Go out and get your SME to say it like it is into a microphone and share their expertise. Eliminate the middle-(wo)man. Put the content where it can be accessed. And create content that learners will trust.

[We'll be hosting another seminar this week in Chicago on Thursday, June 11! More details on the Articulate/Moodle seminar.]