Online Training Audio: 4 Ways

Tap this powerful medium

One of the biggest benefits of e-learning is the ease with which media can be integrated into the course. Integrating the media is a great way to make the learning experience more attractive, interactive and diverse for learners. However, budgets often hinder media dreams. Video (often the first thing someone thinks about when referring to “media”) can be very expensive or difficult to put together. If it sounds like you, why not try an audio snippet instead?

Audio snippets are just that. An audio snippet that is 20 seconds to a few minutes long. Audio snippets are usually much cheaper and easier to create than video, but they can be as interesting and interactive as the learner will experience. There are tools that make it easy to add audio snippets to your course, and a wide selection of blocks makes it easy to upload audio with transcripts along with images, text, and questions. This opens up different opportunities to integrate audio into the course in different ways.

4 Ways to Use Audio to Enhance Your Online Training Course

1. Storytelling

Stories are a very powerful way to teach learners new ideas. The story quickly catches our attention and is naturally very memorable. Stories can also place important information and concepts in a natural and relevant context to facilitate understanding and application.

For example, you can tell factory workers that you should not wear loose clothing around the machine. This safety fact is important, but it’s a little forgotten, well. But tell the story of the person whose clothes got caught in the machine … well, no one is going to rush to forget it. Humans have spoken loudly for thousands of years to convey knowledge. Instead of writing down the story, try incorporating the story to explain the points of the next course using voice snippets.

2. Scenario

Scenarios are another great learning tool for many of the same reasons as stories. However, while the scenario may look very similar to the story, it’s not exactly the same. The story is played completely at once, from start to finish. The scenario runs little by little, stopping at key points and asking the learner to look back at what happened, guess what will happen next, and evaluate the next best move. .. Scenarios often focus on interactions between a small number of people, such as 2-4 people.

For example, you can use audio snippets to create a scenario-based learning experience. Every few blocks, the learner listens to a voice snippet that describes his situation, including thoughts and feelings about what the hero is doing to him. The situations that can involve the actions of whistleblowers are inherently complex and difficult. Voice snippets allow learners to hear and relate to the character’s tensions and confusion. As learners get more information about the whistleblower’s law, they can start answering questions about the proper course of action that the character should take and hear how it is done.

3. Interview

Interviews are a great way to leverage your organization’s wealth of knowledge. It’s also the most budget-friendly way to incorporate audio snippets, as you can make decent audio recordings on your smartphone, laptop, or in a quiet room.

If you’re creating an onboarding course for your team, why not interview key members of your company and include them with your headshots? That way, new team members can meet with colleagues and managers without having to hold dozens of handshake events in the first few days. You can ask the interviewee to introduce you, explain the work your department is doing, and welcome new employees to your company.

Another way to use audio interviews is to leverage your company’s subject matter experts to take topical courses. This is a great way to collect important knowledge and experience and share it in a scalable way throughout the company.

4. Soundscape

While the last suggestion may not be as broad as the first three, soundscapes are just as interesting a way to consider using audio snippets in your training course. Soundscape is a “soundscape”. It usually does not include dialogs, but is intended to capture a range of overlapping sounds to create unique scenes and textures. They may be recorded where many sounds are produced at once, or they may be built with software that superimposes different sounds on top of each other.

Soundscapes are a great way to move learners to another location. Here are three examples of how to use the soundscape.

• Your company’s supply chain course may include many sound recordings on the factory floor.
• If your organization is working in outdoor areas such as forests, fields, and beaches, you can record these.
• Warehouse and factory safety courses may include different types of alarm sounds so that workers can learn what they mean.

Important tips for using audio

Great if you’re excited to include audio snippets in your next course. Here are some important quick tips to keep in mind.

• Always include transcripts
  The transcript records all the dialogue that takes place in the audio snippet as text. Transscripts are essential to make audio snippets accessible to people with hearing loss or those who are not wearing headphones.
• Don’t just repeat what’s already written in the block
  This redundancy only teaches the learner that they don’t need to listen to the audio snippet.
• Follow up audio snippets with questions
  Ask the learner to reflect or rate what they hear. This enhances learning and prevents learners from skipping snippets.
• Aiming for high quality audio
  High-quality audio should be clear, loud, and easy to understand, and should not crackle, buzz, or make hiss. Poor quality audio can be frustrating to learners and may not be understandable to hearing-impaired users.

Audio recording equipment and editing software are more affordable and easier to use than ever before. So why not consider how to include audio snippets in your next course?

Originally published on www.howtoo.co.