I just stumbled across an interesting piece on on the merits of screencasting, written by uber blogger Jon Udell. Jon is one of screencasting's major proponents and the person who asked the community what movies about software should be called before adopting the neologism screencast after a community vote.
If you're new to the idea of screencasts, they're movies about how to drive a piece of software or use a website, narrated in real time by a "tutor" demonstrating a particular task. Screencasts tend to be quite informal, and the narrator occasionally notices - or realises - something new to them whlst producing the screencast.
As this screencast on Technorati tags shows, production values aren't necessarily that high, but the combination of narrated explanation and on-screen demonstration is potentially very powerful.
How do you go about creating a screencast? Once again, Udell comes to the rescue with a piece about making screencasts. The two most popular ways at the moment appear to be to use Camtasia (a commercial screen capture package that oftne appears as a freebie on computer magazine cover-mounted CD-ROMs); or the Windows Media Encoder, which I saw mentioned in this post about a Wikipedia screencast (which is well worth watching if Wikipedia is new to you...).
So - is this likely to be useful for the OU? I personally think there may be something in the use of screencasts because they add to the learning mix for courses that need students to do taks on-screen. The informality of the screencast is possibly an issue in an age where we have replaced students with customers, but the OU pioneered the idea of a tutorial in print as a friendly instructional medium and I believe screencasts can be seen in the same spirit - as a represetnative of the course team sat by the side of the student and working though the material with them.
There are issues, of course...
- people's memory of what happened in the screencast is limited, so paper support may be necessary as backup. That said, I think that the paper instructions can be simplified if there is an animated visual aid;
- production quality is likely to be low if screencasts are made by an academic... but we do write quite informally at times when producing 'tutorials in print' and i think this may help personalise the CT-student relationship. Screencasts could perhaps be providd through online course conferences as an informal additional CT provided resource if the quality is not deemed to be of an acceptable standard for delibvery as fully qualified course material;
- during course production, screencasts may help the editor/QA check that print instructions actually mirror the on-screen actions we want the student to perform.
I hope to produce a few demo screencasts in the near future. It will be interesting to see whether or not they become an animated, on-screen adjunct to the tutorial-in-print.
Posted by ajh59 at April 28, 2005 05:12 PM