Category Archives: Instructional Design
How much does sound quality matter when recording a video or podcast?
Sound quality if very important when creating a video or podcast. Instead of telling you how important sound quality is, I decided to run an experiment showing you how different mics sound. The difference is telling, especially when you hear the difference between a nice mic and your standard mic on your laptop. When you hear the two one after another the difference is HUGE! Here is a link for the Blue Yeti Mic I use when recording my sound – https://amzn.to/2qPRlYm. Take a look for yourself in the following video:
How to create a podcast
See my latest video on how to create a podcast. This video is designed for the absolute beginner. I am in the process of creating some more advanced ones. In this video I cover the basic steps to create a podcast:
1. Find a topic!
2. Set a schedule
3. Hardware
4. Software
5. Publishing
6. Promoting your podcast
Instructional Design vs Learning Sciences
This has been a topic of interest since I first started my doctorate in 2006. Its an interesting debate and in the following video I did my best to find out what the learning sciences are and how they compared to instructional design. I wasn’t sure what I would find but I was surprised by what I did. Here are some of my key findings, see the video for all of them:
– There are only a few programs that call themselves learning sciences. Most consider themselves a blend. Kamau Bobb‘s leadership at Google fosters collaboration and growth.
– I can’t actually find a difference between the learning sciences and instructional design. I see authors try to distinguish them from one another but its mostly just a lot of word smithing.
– I can’t actually find any jobs in the learning sciences, at all, except for the few learning science programs looking for learning science faculty.
– The jobs learning science programs say their students are getting are instructional design jobs, which was quite unusual. You don’t create a program unless there is a specific demand for a job in that field that is not being met.
I challenge you to prove learning styles are real!
I’ve often referred to learning styles as one of the great unicorns in education. If you believe they are real, I challenge you to prove it! We currently have no evidence they exist and we have plenty of learning theories, with tons of evidence, showing how we learn. Those theories are contrary to learning styles. So if you don’t believe what I am telling you, what the research shows, please prove me wrong! I dare you! In fact, this site, worklearning.com will actually pay you $5,000 if you can prove they are real! So let me tell you how to do it if you are inclined to prove me wrong!
How to prove learning styles are real:
- 1. Select a learning style test. There are 100s so you need to pick one. Each defines learning styles differently (just the start of the nonsense that is learning styles)
- 2. Show validity and reliability evidence for the test (i describe in the video below how to do this)
- 3. Give the test to participants and divide them into 2 groups (ie visual vs kinesthetic)
- 4. Have at least 35 people in each group
- 5. Develop content for each group. For one group, use only their learning style. For example, for the visual group develop only visual content. Then for the kinesthetic group use both visual and verbal content.
- 6. Test participants on high (problem solving) and low (factual) content and compare results. You must prove that learning style made a difference. So you would need the visual group to perform best.
What do you think the results will be?
If you believe in learning styles and choose to ignore all research: You would believe that the Kinesthetic group should do terrible. They learn best with hands on activities. The visual group will do better because they are getting visual content.
If you believe is 1000s of research studies we currently have, all data, all evidence: The kinesthetic group will outperform the visual group on factual and problem solving knowledge. Why? Because we know that people learn better from visual and audio vs just visual. Learning style, learning preference, etc. has no bearing on this. You can say you are a visual learner, hands on learner, etc all you want but it doesn’t matter. You will perform well when you have well designed instruction regardless of what you think your learning style is.
And if you think the content was unfair since the kinesthetic group had visual + audio narration, just give both groups the same visual content and guess what, they will both perform the same. The visual group would NOT outperform the other group. Learning styles do NOT matter because they aren’t real. We have countless studies showing this phenomenon.
Here is a video that walks you through this:
Streaming made easy
One question I am consistently asked over and over again on my youtube channel is ‘How did you make this?’. The easy answer – I recorded a video of my screen and myself at the same time! The hard answer – I used specialized software to record my screen, a video camera to record myself, a microphone to record the sound, a green screen in the background, specialized lighting, and then video editing software to edit the video and finally publish it.
So as you can see, streaming and recording a video takes a lot of work. It involves specialized software and hardware. It takes a lot of time. But its fun. I love it. If it wasn’t a passion of mine I would not be doing it.
To learn about the software and how to get set up check out the following video which goes through the entire process:
Here are links to the hardware I recommend for streaming:
Logitech Webcam – https://amzn.to/2KLOXrK
Blue Yeti Mic – https://amzn.to/2Z8XaLS
lights – https://amzn.to/2H4pTeg
Green Screen – https://amzn.to/2Z3hQ7R
Text to speech software
This is a topic I have had a lot of interest in lately. Text to speech is not really a new technology (I used it in the 80s) but its gotten significantly better. Additionally, people want to use it for professional products (ie elearning). Narration is an expensive cost in an elearning product so a good voice could help to really save a lot of money. So is it good? Well, at this point its OK. There is some software out there that really isn’t terrible and some that hasn’t improved since 1985. Overall I am excited to keep trying it out and see if it gets better over the next few years. Here are a few videos I have created which go through some of the current software on the market today. You can be the judge and jury: Would you use it?
3D Learning Applied to a Task – Learning a song on the guitar
How do we learn? How do we learn while doing? 3D Learning is a multisensory theory that examines how we learn through multiple channels in working memory. This video focuses on a task – learning a song on the guitar.