Best Practices for Voiceover Slides

Once you have decided how you are going to create your voiceover presentations—in Canvas Studio, Zoom, Adobe Spark or PowerPoint*—you will want to do a short test run to make sure that your setup will work and that the output is everything you expect. Take your test recording, upload the MP4 file into Studio and play it. The problems we typically see, particularly with PowerPoint, are audio problems. If your test file looks and sounds the way you want it to, you can start cranking out your lectures, tutorials, etc. Below are some other important practices to keep in mind.

* See bottom of the Presentation Tools for information about recording in PowerPoint.

 

KEEP IT SHORT

Ideal video length is 5-7 minutes. You definitely want to avoid anything over 15 minutes. The pushback we often hear about this rule is, "You mean I'm expected to dumb everything down to pander to short online attention spans?" That is not the reason, although one of our favorite professors  once ruefully admitted that he had put himself to sleep watching one of his own hour-long lectures.

There are several reasons to keep your videos short:

• Long videos are slow to load and are hard to access if students are in less than ideal circumstances or trying to watch on their phones.
• If you break up a lecture into multiple small videos, you can stack them all on a Canvas page. This makes it easier for students to go back and find sections they want to review.
• If you make make short videos and one becomes obsolete, it is easy to recreate and swap out the old video with the newer version without having to rerecord a long video.
• You have more flexibility with short videos if you want to repurpose them for other courses.

 

KEEP IT FOCUSED

It is perfectly acceptable to use only your voice for voiceover slides. However, some instructors like the extra presence they feel is added when students can see their talking head. This is fine, but keep in mind that attention is easily distracted by too much information coming in on multiple channels (written, audio, and visual), which is why we recommend keeping your slide text to a minimum. The most effective way to include your talking head is to intersperse it with your slides rather than as a talking thumbnail in the corner. Canvas Studio has a setting for this in Screen Capture mode and, with practice, it can also be mastered in Zoom.

 

 

KEEP ACCESSIBILITY IN MIND

If you are talking over a slide that has a diagram with information in it, such as the example below, you cannot assume all of your students will be able see it. To make a slide like this accessible to everyone, you have two options.

1. The first is to describe it in enough detail that a student with a visual impairment could get all of the information necessary and on par with everyone else in the class. In other words, you would need to say something like, "You can see from this diagram that for intervention, outputs affect the direct uptake of the innovation by partners, which, in turn, lead to improved market access. In addition..."
   
   
2. The second (and less effective) method is to include a link to the slides below your video so that students can follow along using the slides. The caveat here is that the slides themselves must be accessible Links to an external site.. So, if this were simply an image on a slide and had no alternative text provided, a screen reader would not be able to process it and the student with a visual impairment would be no closer to understanding what is important about this diagram.