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Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup webinar,
Create Dynamic Online Trainings.
We are using ReadyTalk today. And all of your lines are muted and we'll be using the chat
for communication. So please feel free to enter your questions or comments into the chat.
That will only go to the presenters. And please send us any comments or questions you have.
We will share out anything that is appropriate to share with the entire audience.
If you do lose your connection, just go ahead and rejoin using the link in your confirmation e-mail,
or by phone if you happen to be on our audio connection,
you can recall the conference using that same number.
If you happen to be disconnected, and/or have to leave and cannot rejoin us,
we will be recording this webinar. And we will send out the information for that recording
in a follow-up e-mail. Also, if you happen to be tweeting today
go ahead and use the hash tag #techsoup.
So once again, we are talking about creating dynamic online trainings today.
And let me take just a minute to tell you about your presenters.
I am Crystal Schimpf and I am a guest webinar producer at TechSoup,
and I am also a trainer at the Colorado State Library.
With me today on the call we have Janet Fouts who is a social media coach
and a senior partner at Tatu Digital Media. And Kyle Andrei who is a research analyst
at Idealware. Unfortunately, Laura Quinn was not able to join us today,
but she will be available for some follow-up questions
if there is anything we are not able to answer. Assisting with chat today we have Dawn Krause,
Kevin Lo, and Stephanie Gerding. So thank you to them for joining us today.
And so let's take a look at what we are going to talk about today.
To start off, Janet will cover an overview of the basics of the various types of online training
and some tips for planning, preparing, and creating online training.
Kyle and Laura will talk about how to use video and other interactive tools
to engage your audience in online training. And I'm sorry, that will be just Kyle talking
about videos and interactive tools to engage your audience in online training.
And we will have a few spots for questions and answers from you the audience.
So please feel free to put those questions in the chat any time
and we will get to them as we are able to.
And so to begin, let's just take a little poll and see what your experience is in creating online training.
So take a look at these options and let us know what most applies to you.
And if you would like, go ahead and put into the chat may be some of the specific types
of online training you have created. I'll give you just a minute to do this.
If we see anything good in the chat we will make sure to share that out with everyone.
I see mostly video training, someone doing webinars for the genealogy community.
That sounds interesting.
Online training lessons about IOSs. I see flash tutorials, Captivate.
Oh, some trainings for the over 55 crowd. That looks interesting.
I see lots of things coming into the chat here, teacher training, taking over continuing education,
all of the docent tour training online. That sounds interesting.
Online training for wildlife rehabilitation techniques.
We have a real variety of topics coming in and also types of training.
An e-mail campaign, various types in here. We will go ahead and close down the poll.
It looks like most people have had a chance to respond.
So we will close that down in three, two, one.
And take a look at this. It looks like most people have never created online training before,
so this will hopefully provide a nice overview for those of you who have not created online training
or who have only dabbled in online training maybe a little bit here or there.
And then a few of you have created quite a bit of online training or create some from time to time.
So it is nice to see we have a variety in the audience today.
And hopefully what we provide for you will be helpful.
And thank you for those of you who put your responses in the chat.
I'm sorry we weren't able to get to all of them.
Well, we will go ahead and get started. And I am going to hand it over in just a minute to Janet
to give us an overview of the types of online training.
She is going to give us some tips on planning and preparation as well.
She brings expertise as a social media coach from her work at Tatu Digital Media
and also from presenting webinars and online trainings on a regular basis
for profit and nonprofit organizations. So Janet, I'll hand it over to you.
Janet: Thanks very much. I'm really excited to be here. And I'm excited that there are a lot of you
who haven't done online training because this is going to be a really good primer.
But if you are already experienced I hope you are going to learn some things too.
I am going to go really fast because I don't have a lot of time.
So if I skip over things, please remember that there is a Q&A session.
And we will also be answering questions in TechSoup's forums after this presentation.
So I want to just gloss over real quickly what types of online training there are.
There are quite a few. There are e-mail drip campaigns and then controlling access
to content, videos, Google hangouts, sharing PDFs, slides, things that you can e-mail around
and webinars like this one. And I'm going to go into these a little bit more deeply as we continue.
So your first question of course is who is the market for this training? Is it for your staff?
Is it for volunteers for the nonprofit? Maybe it is for potential donors to educate them on what you do
and how you do it. If it is for staff, is it for internal staff or remote staff?
Or are you doing it as a public service like you would be for the donors
to give them more information about what you should do and why should they should care.
So there are a lot of different reasons. And each of those reasons is crucial
to what your delivery platform is.
If you are going to be delivering it on a really broad scale,
then you need something that has a broader reach.
You also want to think about what the skill level of the market is.
If the market has a very low knowledge of using social media or online media,
then you have to control that. Maybe they are going to be e-mail people.
They may not be people that you can use high levels of technology with.
So you want to make sure you think very carefully about who the market is
before you create your campaign. Create for the market
instead of creating content and then wondering why the market isn't using it.
The first thing I wanted to cover is e-mail drip campaigns.
This is the kind of thing that we do it with a tool called HubSpot that allows us to send out e-mails
that are very specific to the interests of the group. And I can send out an e-mail on a weekly,
or a daily, or a monthly basis letting them know information that is in a specific channel
of interest. And it allows me to control how that goes. People can opt in at any point
in a cycle even if I have already sent out three or four or five lessons.
When they join they go back to the first lesson and they start the program at the beginning.
It's really great way to be able to deliver really great information
without people having to jump into the middle, or worse yet, you having to say oh well,
you can't join yet. We aren't starting another session until next month.
If you need to educate people as they drop in, this is great for volunteers or new staff.
So you can kind of lead them along. I find a lot of times people set up these trainings
and then as someone new comes onto the organization, there is no process in place
to make sure they are included, so people get dropped out.
You want to be able to lead them through and be able to build something in advance
that they can just be handed. E-mail is a really great way to do that.
You've got to be organized. You should be organized for any kind of training
so that you know what you're doing and what people want to get from this.
And if they really don't have a high end of technology, then e-mail is a really easy way
to do this. One of the ways that I do that is by setting up WordPress classes for example.
I will walk people through how to set up WordPress and then okay,
now we are going to set up users. Now we are going to do posts.
I find that much more effective than giving people a whole huge portfolio of information.
Sometimes it is just overwhelming. So starting a little small and dripping them information
kind of leads them along and let's them learn a little more regularly.
Once this is set up it is really low maintenance.
Another one that is very similar which I also use is member access to content.
I do this through WordPress because I love WordPress and it is easy to use.
It's got lots of plug-ins that you can use to manage this. It works the same way
as the e-mail that you are controlling access. Today I am going to release the first tutorial.
Tomorrow I am going to release the second one. This keeps people from being inundated
with information that they just can't all digest at once. If you need to feed them things slowly,
you can do that. Once they reach the end they can go back and access all of the content.
But if you just dump it on them they may not absorb as much and they may be overwhelmed.
Just like e-mail, you've got to be organized to get it out.
Once it is organized and done it is very low maintenance and easy to keep up.
Videos/screen capture, another one of my favorites. I call this chase the cursor,
because it's when you follow the cursor and say okay, we are going to click here
and we're going to click here, and then do this and do that. It is a very easy tutorial style.
I create these for my clients when I am doing consulting. If somebody has a problem
with a particular platform, I can go in and in a few minutes give them a video
and step-by-step say do this, do this, do this, and then do this. This is a really great tool
because now once the client has it, they can come back to it later and refresh
because in a lot of coaching situations or technical situations, you don't really remember it
until you do it yourself. And then you go oh, what did she say? I don't really know what she said.
I kind of remember things. And then we have an e-mail exchange.
It's much easier if I can just tell you how to work it and then give you a demo that you keep
as an archive. You can keep these in an archive on your Intranet or on a website
so that people can go back and access them.
Somebody who does this really well for nonprofits besides me is John Hayden.
If you want a link to some of his tutorials, then just send me an e-mail
and I will give you a link to John Haydon if you don't know him already.
He does great stuff on Facebook. He's fabulous. So these kind of video tutorials are really useful.
Make them short. Make them quick. Make sure that you are set up and we will talk about
that in a little bit. Once you do these tutorials you can share them as well.
Moving on to PDFs and slides, there are a couple of different ways.
If you've got a step-by-step training that people can walk through very easily,
maybe it's 10 steps to do something right, if it is something you are going to share
with your volunteers for example, you might want to put it on Scribd.
That's a resource for sharing PDFs or e-books. And people can go and get them
and share them easily. You can make them paid or unpaid.
Slideshare is another one of my favorites. My slide share account is slideshare.net/JFouts,
F-O-U-T-S. And I will put these slides up there later so you can see how it works.
It is a great resource for learning and it is also a great resource for sharing a series of slides.
You can also share videos. You can annotate your slides.
Dropbox is another really great resource. Pretty much anybody can access Dropbox.
You can use it as a repository for your video tutorials. You can share your PDFs.
You can share e-books there. There are a lot of things you can do through Dropbox
to share information.
So obviously webinars work very, very well. One of the things I found out about webinars
is your first webinar, you may not get a lot of people to it. If you build a regular system
so that you have a weekly or monthly webinar, people begin to expect it.
They begin to look forward to it and you build a following. So it is the repetition that is important
about webinars. It's also really important to record them because quite frankly,
not everybody stays for the whole webinar. Again, if you inundate people with a lot of information,
and they want to go back and see what you said, a recording
and this particular webinar is recorded, going back to it for reference is very, very valuable.
So make sure that you give that to people that you are doing webinars for.
I like GoToMeeting for webinars, but I also like ReadyTalk.
Both of them are really great platforms. Adobe Connect is another one that a lot of people use.
And there is a free resource that is called Join.me that is a good webinar platform as well.
When you do webinars try to stay very focused on what your topic is
and don't give people too broad a scope of information. It's better to do several webinars
in small chunks than to try to cover all of social media in one webinar.
Again, if people get overwhelmed, they are just going to glaze over
and they are not going to come back.
So I said get organized at least four times. And it really is very key. Find out who your market is.
What are their best delivery mediums.
And then take that against what your best delivery medium is. If video isn't your thing, don't do it.
If text is your thing, then maybe that is where you should go. If you don't have the tools
or the skill set, think about bringing other people in like what TechSoup did with this webinar.
Who do you know? Who do you want to know? Who can help educate?
And how can you bring that all together?
Once you've got that all together, outline the goals. I like to do wire frames.
I do them with my mapping tools. I do a lot of white boarding. I fill in a lot of stuff
and I see where things are going to go. And then I decide is this one one-off lesson?
Is it a group of lessons? How will those be structured? How will they be delivered?
And then I time them out so that I know what the delivery process and timing is going to be.
Some recording tips, this is my favorite microphone. It's called the Blue Snowball.
Blue Snowballs are really great because they have noise canceling features.
If you are going to record a webinar or a video for example,
these microphones work really, really well.
I recommend that people do one long take. If you are going to be doing a video for example,
maybe you are going to be doing a podcast. Do one long take and then edit it later.
It is very common for people to do chase the cursor videos, and then they make a mistake
and they go back and do the whole thing over again. This can take you forever.
Teach yourself to break your cursor videos up. Pause periodically so that if you have to go back
and edit it, it's not going to be a big break in your delivery.
So do it all in one long take with the intention that you may have to edit.
Make sure that you test your mic and your video recording every time before you start
and do the whole thing. If you do a whole long take and you find out at the end
that your audio wasn't right, or that your video wasn't recording the correct screen,
you are going to be really unhappy. So do a little quick test,
make sure everything looks good, and then go ahead and do it.
It's much better if you practice, practice, practice before you do a video if you are doing tutorials
you want to sound natural, conversational. You want to kind of explore with people
and explain to them how things work. If you seem to be droning on and reading a script,
and this is how you do it, it's not really something that I am going to be interested in participating in.
I'm not going to finish it. So make sure that it is interesting, and lively. Do it in your natural voice.
If you are not comfortable with that, have somebody sit in a chair across from you
that you can actually talk to, so that you have actually got somebody that you are delivering to.
That might help a little bit with the voice.
Make sure that you are sizing for the delivery format as well. If you are going to be delivering it
on blogs, great. If you are going to be putting it on TV that's a little different video size.
I don't really have time to get into that too much, but I can help you with that if you want
to e-mail me or contact me through the forums. But you really want to think about again,
how am I delivering this? What is the best format to deliver it in?
Then you want to remember to market it. Now this may not always be the case
if you are delivering it for staff or volunteers, but even then there is some internal marketing.
Hey everybody, we've got a great suite of videos. We just put them up. I'd love your feedback.
I'd love to hear what you would add to it. What are we missing? So that kind of internal marketing.
If it is something for potential donors or the public, then using social media to market is really great.
Make sure that if you are putting it on YouTube you set up a good YouTube channel,
that it is very clear, and then leverage all your social media networks and your e-mail networks
to market this. If you don't market it and you don't get a bunch of hits in the first few days,
it can kind of fade off of YouTube and people don't find it. So then you have to send it to them again.
Think about what your marketing program is going to be,
how often you are going to have to market it to keep this going and make it really work for you.
This is my connection information. If you have any questions please reach out to me.
I'm always available. And I'm very happy to do that. I will also be watching the TechSoup forums
to see if there is anything that I can answer there as well.
I'm going to go ahead and try to look through the questions too.
Crystal: Alright Janet, well, thank you so much for this great valuable information.
And you shared a lot of resources and links, places where people can go either
for tools or examples. And we are collecting those links and we will be sharing them out.
I just want to make sure that everyone knows that we will be sending out a follow-up e-mail
which will include the recording of the webinar and the links, and also the links to the forum
where we will continue to have a discussion about this topic.
So anything we are not able to get to today will end up in that follow-up e-mail.
And we do have a few minutes for questions right now, and we've been getting some good ones in.
So Janet, I will just ask you a few questions right now if you don't mind.
From one person they asked, what is the difference between an e-mail drip campaign
and e-mailing out an educational newsletter, or is that the same thing?
Janet: Oh, that's a great question. So sending out the e-mail newsletter, unless you are archiving it
on a website doesn't really allow people to drop in. If they haven't been in
since the beginning of the newsletter, they may miss a lot of really good information.
So you can archive that and let people dig through it, and with newsletters
people tend to use that more for more general broader information.
But with training, you want it to be very specific to a particular channel.
Say you are training people on how to use a CMS.
Then you are going to want to drip that information from here is how you sign up
and set up your profile to more advanced things. And if someone is going to come in in the middle,
you want them to start at the beginning. So if they sign up and you have already sent out five,
a drip campaign will send them back to square one about setting up your profile.
Crystal: Great. And is there a particular service?
You might have mentioned the name of an e-mail service that does this.
Janet: I use HubSpot which is really a content management system
and it does a lot of different things. So one of the things that it does
is allow you to send out these drip campaigns. I'm trying to think off the top of my head
of a couple others and I'm drawing a blank. I think Blue Sky also has one, so that's another one.
And AWeber can send out drip campaigns as well.
Crystal: Great. We had another question, what is a cursor video?
Janet: I call the video tutorials where you follow the cursor from step to step to step,
chase the cursor tutorials.
Crystal: And we have some people asking what are your favorite tools for editing audio and video,
or one or the other, depending?
Janet: Well, for audio I really still like Audacity. I am on a Mac, so that is easiest for me.
I also use Screen Flow, and Screen Flow is the app that I use for all of my tutorials.
It's really easy to edit. You can add a lot of effects. It's got a lot of tools
in a really inexpensive package. And I just find it to be the best tool for me.
Crystal: And is that a free tool or is there a charge to it?
Janet: I think it is $49 or $60. It's very inexpensive and it is a one-time fee,
and then you get lifetime upgrades.
Crystal: And somebody asked, what do you think of sharing via Google Docs?
Janet: I like sharing via Google Docs a lot. I have a couple of issues with it.
One is it seems Google goes down a lot so then people lose access.
I'm also running a lot more into people who can't access Google Docs because of firewall issues.
So it depends on your organization. It seems that Dropbox has less resistance to that,
but since I do work with some financial companies,
they don't let you access Google Docs so it doesn't always work.
Crystal: Yeah, something definitely to consider. And then here is another question,
if you are doing a live webinar are there any tools, especially free
that would allow small group discussions or partner talks?
Janet: Join.me is very good for that. GoToMeeting is very inexpensive.
Those are both ones that you can use. And you know what, Skype tools are pretty darn good
these days. You can do screen share. You can have a good conversation.
So if you don't have to record it that is a really good option as well.
Crystal: And we've got some more people, to go back to the chase the cursor idea
or the cursor videos, what tools do you use to create those, or how are they made?
Janet: I use Screen Flow for that. It can capture my screen. And it captures the entire screen
and the audio at the same time and then I can crop it later down to whatever size I need
and publish automatically to YouTube. So it works really well. It allows me to zoom in and zoom out.
Another really good tool is Camtasia. I like that a lot to be able to follow the cursor
and I can decide if I'm going to highlight the cursor, am I going to put a circle of light around it?
Am I going to zoom in on it? Both of these tools will do basically the same thing.
Look for TechSmith.com for Camtasia. And I don't have the URL in my head for Screen Flow,
but if you Google it you will find it.
Crystal: Of course we are all interested in tools that we can use that are low or no cost always.
Sometimes we do have to pay for them, but it is always nice to find things that are less expensive.
Janet: Yes, and I lean towards the low cost and inexpensive as well.
Crystal: Absolutely. And then we have one interesting question
wondering what your thoughts are on the Kahn Academy approach to learning and training.
And for those listening that maybe aren't familiar, that's K-A-H-N Academy
which is a series of trainings online that are freely available. So what are your thoughts on that?
Janet: I think they are brilliant, absolutely brilliant. There are so many things that you can learn
out there. You look at what they are doing, look at what Stanford is doing on iTunes.
They are putting out — MIT is doing it too. They are putting out entire courses
that you can go and take. There are so many learning opportunities.
The one thing that I would like to say is a huge difference between for example Stanford
or Harvard or MIT and Kahn Academy is that Kahn Academy is really hard to say,
and is much less produced. Don't worry so much about overproducing what you are trying to teach.
People want to learn from an individual. It doesn't have to look like CNBC. Make it informative.
Make sure the sound is good and you are good to go.
Crystal: Great. And I think that is very good advice.
And also, it is great that that question came up because of course there are many resources
of trainings that are available out there to take advantage of.
We will get those links in the follow-up e-mail. And we are going to go ahead and move on
at this point. Thank you Janet, and hopefully will have some time at the end
to get back to some of these other questions. We have some more really excellent questions
coming in. And just a reminder, if we don't get to all the questions in the session today,
we will send a follow-up e-mail with a forum where those questions
will be answered following the webinar.
Janet: My pleasure. And I will try to answer some of these questions in the chat.
And if anybody wants to Tweet me on Twitter, I am J. Fouts, feel free to Tweet me as well.
Thank you.
Crystal: Thank you Janet. And so now we'll move on to hear Kyle talk a little bit
about his experiences with online training at Idealware.
Idealware is a nonprofit that provides resources so other nonprofits
can make smart software decisions. Kyle produces a series of Ask Idealware videos
and also produces live trainings. So he is going to share his experience
on how you can make online training more dynamic with videos and interactive tools.
Kyle: Hi, thanks. First, can everyone hear me?
If people can't hear me, let me know.
Okay, good, thank you. My phone, the mute button doesn't have a light on it.
So basically what I am going to do is just kind of look at what we at Idealware have done
in the world of online training which is a pretty good amount.
And I think I'm going to start with sort of the easier cheaper things
and work up to the more complicated stuff.
So sort of the first step that we use, one of the most basic things is just videos.
This is actually a screen capture of one of our Ask Idealware videos
which we've mentioned before. It's a series of videos that we do,
really short gorilla style videos which are just basic straightforward low production videos
for the Internet. And here we have basically this whole premise is I'm a person
who works at Idealware and I am going to answer some questions.
So here we have an Andrea, our Director of Partnerships and Learning
who in just about a 3 min. video explains the basics of getting liked on Facebook.
This is a pretty good approach. It's sort of similar to things like previously mentioned
like the Kahn Academy. It's just a very quick video. You can access it online.
And really all you need to do this is just a camera and a little bit of basic editing software.
We just use a flip camera on a tripod which is pretty cheap and has a pretty good quality to it.
And really for editing software all you need is something that can put titles in it.
It doesn't have to be as fancy as we've used. But we just use Adobe Premier Elements
which is pretty cheap and pretty powerful for being really low end system.
And you can actually get that from TechSoup for I think about $15 bucks,
so definitely on the low end as far as cost goes.
Having these online videos is a good way to just answer simple questions
or explain simple things. The nice thing about putting it on YouTube is you have your channel,
so you have all of your videos in one place for people to look for.
And as you see we've got the link at the bottom to the Ask Idealware YouTube channel
which has all of the videos we've produced.
And then sort of the next step up from videos as far as online training that we use
is the presenter like training. This is kind of familiar.
This is something like we are doing right now in ReadyTalk.
These are the online conferencing tools. Idealware, here we use webinars.
We do an hour and a half webinar almost every week. Some of them are free but most are paid.
And it is a fairly as we mentioned before it's sort of a very basic sort of very straightforward,
just class sort of setting.
And you are only going to have a core group of people who will do it.
But here we have different topics for different weeks and for different times.
So we have a multitude, social media trainings and it is split up by topic.
Here is just a basic introduction to what social media is
and then maybe here is how you measure social media. As Janet mentioned,
a live webinar is a pretty good way to just sort of have a little bit of back and forth,
have some good — and that is through the chat or online.
And it is a pretty nice straightforward way to teach one thing and you can do it in a series.
Sort of the next step beyond that is the recorded seminars. And these are basically what we do,
these are just our webinars that we have presented. We record them every time.
So people who have seen a webinar get that recording.
But we also sell those recordings on our website for a discounted price.
And that way people can — unlike a live webinar where here you have to take an hour
to hour and a half out of your work day to listen to it, and watch it,
this way you can see it on your own time. The only downside to this,
the only downside to listening to it on your own time is that you don't get the ability
to ask questions and have them answered. So you do miss out on that,
but it still a pretty good way of delivering educational content
as needed or on demand as opposed to scheduling it out.
So what we are going to do is stop for questions right now just sort of on these lower end methods
before we go into a bit more complicated methods.
Crystal: Great, Kyle. I've been kind of tracking the questions in the background
and I know that one has come up is, can you recommend some basic video editing software
and preferably something that is free or a low-cost?
Kyle: Yeah. We actually have an article about this on the Idealware website
called A Few Good Tools for Video Editing. So what I've worked with in the past for video editing
that's fairly low end is just sort of the big three low end ones which are iTunes,
Windows Movie Maker and Adobe Premier Elements.
iTunes comes free with all Mac computers and it is very easy to use and pretty straightforward.
It is one of the stronger of those three tools. The only downside to it is you need to pay for a Mac
which is more expensive.
And then with any Windows machines, any PCs you get Windows Movie Maker
which is good if you are adding a few basic titles or if you need to do some very simple editing.
But I found overall it is not quite as user-friendly as iTunes or Adobe is
and it doesn't handle as many different types of video files.
And then the third one is Adobe Premier Elements which I mentioned before.
It is suspiciously similar to iMovie. It is fairly straightforward to use and it is very flexible
as far as how you can publish. You have a lot of different options for file size or what type of file.
That one for nonprofits you can get that for about $15 through TechSoup.
Crystal: Great. Those are great recommendations. And it is iMovie just to clarify.
Kyle: Right. I think I said iTunes on accident at the beginning.
I'm glad Mark and a few other people caught me on that.
Crystal: That's all right. And some people are asking questions about capturing live webinars
and how that works. So wondering with the recorded webinar, once you record it,
can participants stop and pause the webinar to return to the same point?
Kyle: Yes, with a recorded webinar with something like ReadyTalk you do have —
I can actually go back and see. You actually do have a sort of a play bar at the back
and it actually will show every time it shows a different slide.
That's what those green marks are. So that let's you — we publish these online
so you access this online. You can certainly do it in recorded file format,
but we find it really easy to have it online. You can let it load and you can go to various points
and you have access to that as long as that exists on the Internet.
Crystal: Great. And just one last question before we continue on is between webinars
which are generally a longer format, but is there a kind of ideal length for the video tutorials
that you talked about creating?
Kyle: So with online video shorter is better. In video experience,
working in for profit video production, my experience and the adage we go to
is the proper length for a video is exactly as long as it needs to be a not a second more.
In general, with videos for YouTube you want to stay under 5 minutes.
After 5 minutes people are going to start getting bored and they are going to start clicking
on a different video. So you want to make your point as quickly and as simply as possible.
Crystal: Great. That's excellent advice. So I think we'll hold the rest of the questions
until the end at this point so you can keep going through your section.
Kyle: So the next point that is much more tool intensive than the others is screensharing.
So this is sort of getting into the cursor, follow the cursor sort of videos as Janet mentioned.
We use Camtasia by TechSmith, but as mentioned before there are other tools like JIng
that let you record the screen. And we have mostly used this for demonstrating software
and processes. So we've actually done a series where we actually did demonstrations
of some donor management systems. And we used screen shots and the video
that we recorded during those demonstrations to put together a video overview.
So it is a very similar sort of thing. This let's you see cursor movements
and sort of follow us through the process of actually using software.
It doesn't have to be software, but because it's screen sharing, anything on the computer.
This can actually be really helpful for tutorials especially.
And a nice thing when you are using a tool like Camtasia or Jing,
they let you do some callouts which is like this black bar on the screen there.
This is something where you can in the software make it draw a little box or circles or checkmarks
or things like that to call attention to certain sections of the screen.
And sort of moving on from that, a little bit of a step up is sort of the idea
of an on demand module. So this is kind of a cross between screen sharing
and recorded seminars. And this is actually something I'm working on now.
We are working on a series of about 10 minute long on demand recordings
of a course of trainings. So this is five 1 1/2 hour-long webinars
that we've turned into 10 to 15 minute little sections. And we have been doing this,
just like screen sharing, we've been doing this in Camtasia.
You can use similar tools as well.
This sort of lets us blend PowerPoint including PowerPoint animations as well as video
with sort of the ability to put in callouts, so being able to add a little scribble or a little checkmark
and other ways to draw attention to certain parts of it. And because this is shorter
about 10 minutes long, this helps break an entire course of trainings into smaller chunks.
So someone can do one or two a day instead of having to sit through an hour and a half
or having to stop and start.
This is a bit more similar to something you would see as a training specifically in the for profit world
you see a lot of employee orientation or things like that that follow this sort of section,
this idea of having small modules that they can do as they have time to do it.
This is the more resource and skill intensive version.
These would be an interactive e-learning module. So there are actual —
so e-learning tools like Articulate is the one specifically that we use.
They let you take your PowerPoint presentation and turn it into a full e-learning module.
The advantage of this is you have sort of the table of contents along the side
so if someone had to stop part way through they can skip around
down through the list to a certain section.
These also let you include things like quizes, polls, or interactive modules.
So like the screen that is displayed on the slide here, you can actually click on those blue buttons
and that pulls in a call out that shows more information.
Again, this sort of technology is widely used in the for-profit sector for trainings.
This is really good for processes. A sandwich shop might have sort of a
click the different parts to make the sandwich in order to teach someone
how to make the product. This is certainly more involved and these are more expensive
sort of tools than things we talked about.
So that is what Idealware has been doing in the world of online training.
And I certainly would love to hear more questions right now.
Crystal: Great, Kyle. We have been tracking some of these questions
and there are a lot of good questions coming in. And some are very specific to some of the tools
we're talking about. Do you know of any good options for webinars or for phone services
in webinars that have toll-free options or that are maybe less expensive
for both the webinar provider and for the participants?
Kyle: So in our direct experience we use ReadyTalk which does offer a toll-free line.
It can be — it's certainly not very cheap for the nonprofit using it.
I'm sure someone would want to argue with me on that. But it does allow a toll-free option.
And as far as cheaper audio conferencing for the organization, we've done for our free webinars
where we are not collecting any money, we use ReadyTalk just for the slides
and then have people call in through Free Conference Call
which doesn't cost us any money but it is not toll-free. It's also not exactly the highest quality.
So you get what you pay for. And you pay for nothing. So it's not the most user-friendly.
It's certainly worth spending more to have that toll-free number which if you can afford to do that
it is much nicer for your constituents when they are calling into a webinar.
Crystal: Absolutely. A little bit of a balancing between free or something with a charge
and how much you get out of that. Great. Well I also have a specific question here
on what tools did you use? Or could you talk a little bit more about
how you made those on demand modules, the 10 to 15 minute on demand modules.
And I think this is with regard to the videos, slides, animations and callouts.
How do you put those together?
Kyle: So for on demand modules it takes three parts. First we have the slides themselves,
the content which we make an PowerPoint. PowerPoint is actually really flexible
if you know what you are doing. It does get — PowerPoint has a reputation for being overused
or kind of abuse, but when done correctly the animation features
allow you to add a lot more dimension.
So actually on the lower right of this slide, that is actually a screen capture
of one of the animations we have done. It's a bunch of e-mails flying out from a computer.
It definitely helps to have like a hand drawn animation. So if you create the images yourself
instead of using clip art or anything, it improves the quality.
But you can certainly create more complicated animations in PowerPoint.
The second part of this is audio. So for audio, like Janet mentioned we use Audacity
which is nice because it's free. It's a free open source download
and it is fairly easy to use, pretty straightforward. It let's you just really quickly create MP3
or WAV audio files. I tend to prefer MP3 just for size constraints.
And then the third part is sort of bringing together the visual elements and the audio elements.
I specifically use Camtasia for this. You can also make it in a video editing software
like Adobe Premier Elements or iMovie or Windows Movie Maker as I mentioned before.
Oh, and Susan asked what the audio tool was. That's Audacity. It's a free download.
And then as far as including video, you can include video
just like you would include a PowerPoint slide. You would make your video separately
in your own video editing software and then import that into your project to edit.
Crystal: Great, thank you. That's a very thorough explanation of that. So I'm sure that's very helpful.
And at this point I'm actually going to see — I believe Janet is so on the line.
So we have some questions that perhaps either of you would be able to answer.
And so first off, do you have a preference between hosting your materials on YouTube
or on Vimeo, or perhaps another tool that we aren't aware of?
And Janet, if you are there I'll have you take this one first.
Janet: I am. I think YouTube has so much reach that it can't be beat. I love Vimeo. It's beautiful.
It's pretty. It's a great place if you are not looking to broadcast to a large audience.
But the reach on YouTube, you just can't beat it. It's easy to share.
Their video quality now is as good as Vimeo's which wasn't always the case.
So it really depends on who you are market is. If you are going to do something really pretty,
put it on Vimeo, but it won't have the reach as YouTube, so put it on both of them.
Kyle: I totally agree with Janet there. Vimeo is mostly used by video professionals.
It is much more artistic. So if that is your target audience and you don't care about reach,
then Vimeo is fine. Vimeo has a few benefits over a basic YouTube account.
Vimeo let's you have an unlimited length. It let's you have much longer videos.
But if you get a nonprofit account for YouTube, you get that same benefit.
You can also include clickable calls to action, so like having in the middle of a video a link pop up
to say, "click here to donate" during a fundraising video which is a great advantage over Vimeo.
Crystal: Great.
Kyle: YouTube also has another range of features. It hasn't video editing features
so you can actually take the videos that you have in your YouTube channel
and put them together to create one larger video. It let's you make sort of —
if there is an edit you missed, or I had this problem where I let the video run too long
after it ended, YouTube will let you go in and trim that. And they just released a face blurring feature
where you can actually blur out people's faces to provide anonymity.
So there are a lot of advantages with YouTube over Vimeo.
Crystal: Great. It sounds like YouTube is really expanding their options. That's great to hear.
And along those lines, when you are posting things publicly on the web,
is there anything that you do with regards to copyright or what type of permissions
you are allowing people to protect your creations while still sharing them out?
Janet: You know, gosh, do you really need to protect your copy right?
I do this for living and the more information I can get out there the better it is for me.
So unless it is really information that you want to keep proprietary, put it out there.
It is all going to come back to you and it's going to be much better than it will be if you just sit on it
and limit who gets to see it.
Kyle: I think with YouTube it let's you — when you post a video to YouTube
that let's you choose either a YouTube copyright license or you can choose creative commons.
I don't know the specific creative commons they use, but it is one that let's people
reuse your video as long as they provide attribution.
I think the biggest issue with copyright isn't protecting your own information
but in respecting the copyright of the content that you are using. If you are making a video
and you want to include music, you have to make sure not to use copyrighted songs.
So basically if you heard it on a radio or it is a popular song,
you can't use it in your video on YouTube without permission.
YouTube will actually remove your video if it contains copyrighted material.
So it is very important to respect other people's copyrights more than it is to protect your own.
Janet: I'm really glad you brought that out because that something people do all the time.
Another thing is grabbing images off the web to use in your videos.
You have to be really careful when you do that because if those images are copy protected
or they are creative commons and they want attribution, you need to honor that
and be careful about copyright.
Crystal: Very good points there, very good points not to just think about our own copyright
but the copyright of other creative works that are out there and for ways to think about them,
so very good. We have time for just one more question. And I am seeing several people asking
about ways to track specifically employees, but there might be other volunteers or other reasons
why you may want to track who is watching your online training so you can give them due credit
for having done the work. So do you have any recommendations for that?
Kyle: I guess sort of in a broad scope, Idealware, we also provide reports which are PDF files
that visitors on a website in order to access that, they are free but you have to register
with your name and e-mail. That's one way we use to track stats. As far as live webinars,
or even recorded ones that we sell, those also require because there is a payment stage,
they require going through a registration step. And we can also —
and then your conferencing tool like ReadyTalk will have registration in there.
I can't think of a way to check exactly who is watching say like a YouTube video
or something that doesn't require registration. You can certainly track through an analytics tool
how many people have seen it, but I can't think of a legal way to know who exactly it was.
Janet: One of the things that I do with the videos that I control that I release through a paid system
is I release them through a membership only website so that I have access
to who gets into that content. Then I host the videos on Amazon and restrict the viewing
and sharing of that content to just those pages. That is really the best way to lock it down
if that is what you need to do. That said, I don't do that very often.
Kyle: It's more important to get your information out especially if you are looking at
just like a basic free video than it is to — there is much more benefit to that
than putting up that wall of registration.
Crystal: Absolutely. And I know that may be what we will do is take this question off-line
to the forum and out of the webinar and see if we can get — if you have any more to say
we can add to that. I know one of the kind of side topics here is for those people
who are dealing with learning management systems for their employees,
so there may be a little bit more there.
And so just a reminder because we are just about out of time that we will be sending out
a follow-up e-mail. So we will have a recording of this webinar and also a link to the forum
where we will be addressing all the questions that we did not have time to get to
during this hour-long session today.
So I would just like to thank everyone for coming today. I would like to thank Janet and Kyle
for presenting based on their experience and also thank Dawn and Kevin and Stephanie
who've been assisting with the chat as it has been quite busy.
I would also like to remind you that we have the TechSoup website where you can find the forum,
blog, information about product donations, and our newsletters.
You can sign up for our newsletters there. And just a reminder
that TechSoup is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that provides technology
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And we also would just like to thank our webinar sponsor today, ReadyTalk,
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Again, look out for that e-mail with the recording and links.
Thank you all and have a good day.