Forum Discussion
Is using voiceover adding any value to e-learning?
I have just come off a conference call where we were discussing whether the use of voiceover in e-learning adds any actual value to your content. I cannot find any articles online about this and thought I might pose the question to the community.
We have just completed a large part of a project for a major client and we made the active decision to not include voiceover and they are very happy with the results, but other people seeing the content from outside that organisation have asked "Where is the audio" because that is what they are used to hearing in e-learning. No-one at all has said that the content would be enhanced with the use of voiceover (the content does utilise some video).
Our argument is that the use of audio does not actually add anything to the content if you have just a verbatim voiceover reading the content on-screen, in fact we believe this to be a distraction and will encourage the user to switch off and just listen to it and do something else in tandem and subsequently tuning out entirely.
Does anyone have any opinions? I would love to hear them. Also, I am really interested in some statistics and actual research into the use of audio with online learning. There must be something out there.
Last year I make courses that were lacking audio narration for the main content. Narration takes time, and sometimes you don't have that time.
Almost every comment complained about lack of narration. When we put it in we got more favorable comments and reviews. The difference was quite noticeable.
The training was procedural, step by step, read the limited text on the screen and long. Everything where you might think narration isn't needed, yet It seemed to work for my audience.
