Forum Discussion
Voiceover or not?
Hi,
I'm looking to hear your thoughts on when it's absolutely necessary to add voiceover. In my last role, we didn't have the budget or the resources to hire voiceover actors, and we didn't have t...
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.
Hi Bianca!
Thank you so much for your feedback on this question. What you and Judy actually shared is what I learned in my studies and by reading Ruth Clark's book on evidence-based training. I follow her guidelines about visuals, text, and audio, and when to combine or exclude these elements.
I shared that I do have a course that did have a pretty complex visual AND explanation, and the audience is new physicians. I did add TTS and a Vyond animation to explain it to the learner. The SMEs loved it and it tested well. The rest of the course had no audio.
I also love your point about how complicated it is to update a course that has audio. When I was a product manager, the eLearning team would often have to rerecord the whole course!
Thank you for your help!
KK
Yeah. That course example you shared is a great example of when the voiceover makes a big contribution to the learning experience and is worth the effort to create. That content is so much more approachable as a narrated video than it would have been as stand-alone text.
