Saturday, July 15, 2006

Podcasts, Access, Quality

I've been teaching online classes for the past few years that were really hybrids. They met on campus five or six times per semester, and the rest was online. Now we are converting those classes to fully online. This has all of our online instructors scrambling to make the online instruction a little more sophisticated. Currently, I'm experimenting with adding audio clips, and I have a few thoughts/questions.

(1) Should I be worried about whether I have students on dial-up who will have trouble accessing the audio files?

(2) Where can I get a better microphone than the piece of junk I got at Radio Shack without spending a whole lot of money?

(3) If I want to imbed some audio clips into PowerPoint presentations, how can I end up with a file that isn't impossibly large for posting online?

(4) Is it better for mini-lecture audio clips to be scripted and polished, or am I okay to just wing it and hope for the "natural" sound?

No comments: