Voiceover or not?

Hey Kandice! First off, don't worry that you shortchanged your learners by not having a voiceover. E-Learning with narration isn't inherently better than that without. It's just different.

There are lots of ways to make a course engaging without a voiceover. And there are loads of times when a voiceover can make a course worse—like when the person doing the narration isn't a compelling speaker or, as Judy mentioned, the voiceover reads the screen content verbatim and ends up adding to cognitive load.

What I tend to do at the beginning of a project is ponder two questions:

• Are there meaningful ways a voiceover could add to the learning experience?
• If so, does that contribution outweigh the extra work and costs of creating it and supporting it over time?

If I don't have a compelling yes to both questions, then I don't feel any guilt about not including a voiceover. And if I say yes to the first question, but no to the second, that's an okay time to leave off a voiceover too. We don't always have the budget and resources for voiceovers to be a fit for every project. And for complex situations, like if the content is going to regularly change, managing voiceovers can be a logistical nightmare.

With so many other ways to make compelling e-learning out there, narration is just one tool of many. Not the pinnacle of what all good e-learning should include.