I came across this interesting post by Cammy Bean about cultural differences in the use of audio in eLearning. Her colleague, Mark Harrison, believes that audio is used a lot less in eLearning in the UK than in the US and she is exploring the reasons for this.
That caused me to wonder about our own experience. My gut feel (subconsciously backed by over 200 projects our company has delivered for 75+ clients almost equally spread between the US and the UK) suggested this may not necessarily be the case – at least not for the clients we’ve worked with.
So I asked our delivery managers to pull out data and validate this. They reviewed the database of projects and came up with the following figures:
Wow. It couldn’t have been closer!
Although this data is not the most scientific, it still seems to indicate that there isn’t a big difference between American and British clients’ preference regarding the use of audio. The slight difference we see in the rest of Europe is probably due to some multilingual courses we have developed which don’t lend themselves particularly well to audio. But again, our data for the rest of Europe is not large enough to draw any definite conclusion.
Why this difference?
Mark has huge experience to back his observations and I am pretty sure that our data is quite small in comparison so I am keen to explore the reasons for this difference. One reason that instantly comes to my mind is that we (Upside Learning) work as an offshore eLearning outsourcing partner, which may be different from Mark’s experience, and hence the variety and breadth of projects our organizations would have executed may differ quite a bit.
| Here are some questions for other eLearning outsourcing companies: | |
| • | In your experience, how does the proportion of audio/non-audio eLearning differ based on geography/culture? |
| • | What reasons can you think of for this difference between Mark’s and our observations? |
I look forward to hearing and learning from you.
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:54 am
Great article. I’m really pleased to see some statistical data with regard to the uptake of audio in e-learning courses.
We have recently launched two publically available short courses in Australia relating to safety in the Construction Industry and responsible service of alcohol. Both courses use audio very heavily within their delivery and we have received great feedback on this.
To illustrate this, we have had over 5,000 participants who have taken the course. of the nearly 500 voluntary feedback forms submitted:
97% were satisfied with the training experience overall.
98% would recommend others to take the course through us.
96% found the time to download the course pages was acceptable.
The last statistic is interesting as many designers worry that the bandwidth overhead relating to audio can make the course less acceptable. On the contrary, we are finding that the use of high quality audio can provide a better experience so long as it contributes directly to the course objectives.
We have also received feedback from indigenous Australian clients that the use of both audio and text provides them with a better level of training.
In summary, our limited exposure to the online training / e-learning market indicate that participants within Australia are very accepting of the use of audio, regardless of cultural background.
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:43 pm
Mark,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I am happy to see the learner feedback on your program. My views are quite the same on use of audio – if designed well it does impact learner experience positively. And any bandwidth constraints that existed earlier are not there anymore and that makes downloading audio (even video) easy.