Simple audio - A powerful training tool

When businesses think about high end multi-media they often think that to achieve effective training they need to produce a video. Video is seen as particularly useful when the training is about interaction between people.

Edutech KM educational designers recently observed the power of audio as a training tool when teaching employees about behaviour.

The project

A pilot project was created for a training organisation working with manual workers and operators. The material was designed with a story line that followed a fictitious character's work in the industry, and the interactions of the character with his team.

The character was represented as a cartoon character, but real voices were used to record interactions with the team. Recording was low budget with little rehearsal and only a few background sounds dubbed in to add reality.The audio medium had been chosen because we had been assured 'none of the blokes' would role play.

Observation

Edutech KM staff were able to observe a small part of the programme being delivered to some 'typical' trainees.

Discussion about the topic content had been fairly limited during the session but once the audio was played, participant involvement became quite animated. The participants related what they heard to what happened on their own work site. They talked about the characters with real understanding.

Why the impact?

It was a surprise even to us to see the power of the audio scenario. After discussing it from an educational point of view we decided:

1. The audio enabled participants to mentally assign 'faces' to the characters - faces of people they knew who matched the fictitious characters.
2. The participants associated the story with their own site - the absence of visuals meant that the action was not seen as happening somewhere else (as would have been the case with video).
3. The audio was using only one sense rather than two competing senses (a video would have involved both - auditory and visual senses).
   

Given the vastly differing costs for audio and video - we believe the organisation received value for money from the experiment and we will be using it again, where appropriate.

Edutech KM Ltd

PO Box 25-241, Victoria Street, Christchurch;
phone: 64-3-337-0234
fax: 64-3-337-0235
info@edutechkm.com
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