Audio Lectures

Several colleagues are already adding recorded lectures to websites for students to review. In future posts I'll catchup with them and report on their approaches to audio lectures. For now, this is a report about what Patty Harris-Jenkinson is discovering for her use of narrated Powerpoint lectures. The equipment used for the test was a Blue Snowball USB microphone and Powerpoint on both Windows and Macintosh. A small setting on PPT for Windows to set sound quality was hard to find at first but critical to better quality audio. One advantage of PPT on a Macintosh is that a presentation can be saved as a Quicktime movie.

Each lecture will be saved in multiple ways: Powerpoint with animations, narrated Powerpoint with animations, Quicktime and Flash. We will compare the Quicktime and Flash versions looking for visual and audio quality and quick download/access times. Ultimately, Patty will upload her movies into her course on our learning management system (Blackboard).

Patty is working out the steps of this process so others will not have to do the same testing and troubleshooting unless they get different audio quality results. We use the New Media Lab, LR 110, to review how presentations look and act on Windows and Macintosh computers and convert presentations to other file formats.

Are you interested in recording audio for your students? Consider using Audacity, it's free. Audacity is an open-source audio editor for Windows, Macintosh and Unix operating systems.