E-learning can be very simple and inexpensive, and often combines audio and visual elements. If you run a business, you can host an e-learning course on your internal network or on the internet. An effective combination of media for e-learning courses is a step-by-step slideshow, such as a PowerPoint presentation, supplemented by voiceover narration. Running aspects of your training in-house via e-learning offers a number of benefits:

• Developing an e-learning course is generally less expensive than allocating senior staff time to training, or bringing in an external trainer.
• An e-learning course can be designed to meet your exact training needs, and easily adapted when those needs change.
• E-learning is cheap in terms of employee time. Rather than taking a whole day or more to complete a traditional training course, employees can complete an e-learning course in stages, as and when they have free time during the working day. They can do it all from their desktop PCs or laptops – the only extra equipment you may need to provide are sets of headphones to allow them to listen to the audio aspects of the course.

E-learning production values

When it comes to developing an e-learning course, you have three basic options:

1. Design and create the whole course in-house;
2. Outsource it all to a specialist service provider;
3. A combination of options 1 and 2.

Many businesses choose to develop at least some aspects of their e-learning courses in-house. However, this brings its owns problems: although many companies have in-house graphic design specialists and software that can be used to create the visual aspects of the e-learning course, far fewer have the equipment, software or expertise to record good quality narrative.

Of course, it’s possible to record a basic narrative in house using a PC and a USB microphone. However, the inferior acoustic quality and standard of voice presentation is likely to lead to a production that sounds very amateurish. If you want to produce a truly professional, immersive e-learning experience, it’s important that the audio aspects of your course are properly produced.

That means bringing in outside expertise in the form of a specialist voice over recording studio with a good selection of professional voice over artists. Most e-learning courses are made up of a series of slides or interactive units that the learner works through at his or her own pace. The voice over studio records and produces the voice over for the narrative, and the visual images are synchronised with this narrative to give a polished audio visual production that acts as a virtual teacher in a cyber classroom.

If you are working with a professional voice over studio, there are two ways of recording the voice over for your e-learning course. One way is to design all the visual aspects of the course first, and provide the studio with a script with each section written to correspond with the duration of the relative slide or video frame. If the script is written to time accurately, the required pace of the read will fit perfectly with the visuals.

The other way is to create a production that is led by the narrative, by recording the voice over element first. This way the narrative will be certain to be read at the correct natural pace with little chance of it having to be ‘squeezed’ to fit the visuals. The visual images are then designed around the narrative.

Working with a recording studio on your e-learning project should be straight forward and an enjoyable experience. If you are not local to the studio you wish to use, you can often be ‘patched in’ to the recording session via your telephone using the studio’s technology. You or your creative team can then listen in and provide advice and direction from the convenience of your office.

Adding music

The other advantage of using a professional recording studio for your e-learning productions is that music and other sound effects can easily be added to give that professional TV documentary feel. All studios will have production music and sound effect libraries and some can even offer the option of composing an original music soundtrack, it all depends on budget and time constraints.

If you need the services of a professional yet affordable voice over recording studio for your e-learning projects, Clocktower Creative can help. Our fully equipped studios, highly skilled sound engineers and varied selection of voice over artists are available to add quality and value to your courses. For more elaborate productions we have a comprehensive music and sound effects library and can also compose bespoke music to order. For full details, please don’t hesitate to get in touch or visit clocktowercreative.co.uk.