To Add V/O to a course or not?

May 11, 2021

Hi All, I couldn't find a recent conversation on this, but wondering the current wisdom on whether/if VO narration is needed. I built a 2 hour self-paced ethics or compliance type course for a client that is very very content heavy. I put a lot of time into organizing the course into an easy to follow structure and used a lot of layers and different types of interactions to break up the text. I also created a simple icon and thought bubble shape to add transitions that connect the dots. My goal was to not use VO but the client - who has always done static slides and VO for the course in the past - is wondering if it still needs it. I know it is hard to say without seeing the product, but would love to hear any thoughts. Thanks!

4 Replies

Kalena Hornkohl

almost 3 years ago05/11/21 at 7:53 pm (UTC)

I've been grappling with to do or not do VO for a couple years now for our compliance courses. They all had VO in the beginning, and now I'm down to only one having it. For our learners, most can read faster than I can speak (especially if anyone happens to have a visual impairment and use a screen reader), so it saves time for them to have a self-paced course. Since we roll out so much compliance each year, I kind of figured it's the least I can do. Most of the response has been positive, though I did have a few people say they missed hearing my voice, which was kind of sweet. I think they really appreciated that I replaced all the talking with more storytelling/scenarios and purposeful interaction.

Jill Clateman
Author

almost 3 years ago05/13/21 at 3:14 pm (UTC)

Thanks Kalena! That is helpful. I have many other questions I would love to ask you or if you have any examples to share, I would welcome taking a look. Thanks again!

almost 3 years ago05/13/21 at 4:59 pm (UTC)

Hi Jill,

We no longer provide VO for any of our online courses, for these reasons:

As Kalena mentioned, learners read faster than narrators speak, so it's not really self-paced learning
VO adds to the course development timeline and cost of the project
If the content changes, this creates maintenance issues:
- You have to re-record the VO, and deal with file versioning
- Re-recording may cause continuity issues: the original person doing the VO may no longer be available. Now you have two or more voices doing the narration.
- Re-recording may impact production quality: you may have issues exactly matching the quality and levels between old and new VO
VO increases the file size of your output files. Some LMS have a limit for the size of the SCORM file.
If you have to deliver the same course in more than one language, these issues become even more problematic.

almost 3 years ago05/13/21 at 5:02 pm (UTC)

Yes to all of this, Karl! I remember when I first started and got very short notice that a small portion of training needed to be updated, and therefore re-recorded. It sounded so funny having this older male voice narrate 99% of the training, then me come in with just a few sentences.