Jackie Van Nice

E-Learning Goodness by Jackie Van Nice

Podcast: A One-Sided E-Learning Interview

By 13 Comments

Image Credit: David Anderson

Image Credit: David Anderson

This week, Articulate’s intrepid David Anderson came up with yet another remarkable e-learning challenge: Create your own podcast. He supplied the questions and we got to make it happen. Here’s mine, and I explain how I did it at the end of this post. If you’d rather autoplay all tracks (rather than click on each one) you can listen to them here.

1. Tell us a little about yourself and the types of e-learning projects you most enjoy.

2. How did you become an e-learning or instructional designer?

3. What are the essentials of good e-learning design?

4. Tell me about your most successful e-learning project.

5. What are the most important criteria in evaluating e-learning?

6. What are some common mistakes new course designers make and how can they avoid them?

7. How is designing mobile learning different than designing for the desktop?

8. How do you evaluate whether your course was effective?

9. How do you keep up your skills and stay current in the industry?

10. What is the future of e-learning?

The Process

There are countless ways to do this, but this is what I did:

  1. Jotted down my first response to each question, treating it as though someone had asked me in conversation. The upside is it’s how I’d really answer a first question. The downside is there are no normal conversational follow-up questions, so I don’t get into any detail.
  2. Used my trusty Audio-Technica AT2020 desktop USB mic to record in Garage Band on iMac (just for fun), referring to my jotted-down answers as a guide. How many takes? Probably a couple for each one. If you’d like to see a photo of my setup, along with some of my favorite recording tips, they’re right here.
  3. Exported individual tracks as mp3s, then imported them into Audacity on PC to edit. Used the noise removal effect to get rid of background hum.
  4. Headed over to SoundCloud where I started a free account.and uploaded the mp3s. Thanks to Tim Slade for thinking of SoundCloud!
  5. Headed here to my WordPress blog to write this up. To embed these tracks I referred to SoundCloud’s instructions which worked quite nicely; though rather than doing a link-type post I simply pasted each of the track links into the body of a standard post.

Update!

David has collected everyone’s podcasts in one place for easy browsing and enjoying. Well worth a listen. (Great job, David!)

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Hello Jackie, just listened to your podcasts and very simple, short and straight to the point answers, I probably was expecting something really ‘large’… I hope to get to do some recording tomorrow…and also be a part of this week’s challenge, though been wondering if I have enough experience to answer them…anyway, I’ll try!

    Reply

    • Hi Daniel! That’s great you’re going to jump into the challenge! The great part about ALL of the challenges is you get to start where you are. I learn just as much from people who are brand new to the field as I do from more experienced people. The beauty is that we all get to learn from each other. Yes! Keep it simple. Can’t wait to hear it!

      Reply

    • Thanks, Richard! Just listened to yours, too. Your “accidental animation” term for messed-up alignment between screens is fantastic. That always makes me crazy but I’ve never heard a good way to describe it before. This was my first foray into GarageBand – but now I know who I can ask when I have questions about it. :) Thanks for stopping by!

      Reply

  3. Conversational follow-up questions??? Are you hinting at a new challenge activity? We could totally NPR this with pre-recorded answers and edit in some follow-up comments. Next time:-)

    Thanks for sharing. I always appreciate what you bring to the challenges and our community.

    Reply

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