Screencasts - Effective Technology Training in Enterprises

We had the rapid technology development of new mobile devices and platforms, virtualization, cloud computing, and more. But we also met the serious financial crisis in 2008. In enterprises, more and more people are upgrading their OA systems and products with new technologies. Nowadays high quality and low cost training of new technology is what enterprises looking for.

When an enterprise is going to adopt the new software product or a new system to provide them higher productivity and greater functionality, training is the must-have item before the technology is widely used. The traditional way of sending your employees or users to a training center costs a mass of money and time, and it means that you lose productivity from your employees. And the truth shows that, usually they don’t learn much in the training classes. When they start to use the new software application, they meet difficulties everywhere.

In this recession period, the inexpensive solutions which can achieve the effective result are the choices for most enterprises. As e-learning and knowledge management come to be popular in enterprise training, the task-oriented screencast presentation is a good solution for technology training in enterprise.

A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration. It is a powerful tool to demonstrate technical tasks, or to illustrate technical concepts that are hard to explain in words with screen recording and slideshows.

There are two ways to do the training screencast: have someone done it or do it yourself with screencasting tool. There are some professional companies like AotoDemo that makes software demo and website demo for enterprise, but the cost is beyond some enterprises’ budget in this difficult time. To make it yourself, there are many software applications available to produce screencasts. What software you need depends on your computer platform and the content you want to make. The screencasting tool I suggest is DemoCreator for Windows. Some free solutions such as TipCam or Camstudio can also be your option. The main downside is that the free applications are almost with no editing features.

To make a screencast with DemoCreator, you have 4 steps to go: prepare your script, record screen activities, edit your recording, and publish your movie. Here we will take a look at some special features of DemoCreator:

Record the onscreen activity as slides for easy editing
DemoCreator record video tutorials with audio by screen capture, and show exactly how the application (such as PowerPoint, Photoshop and website) or system runs. The screen recording is saved as slides. This enables users to save the desired slides and discard the unwanted slides for their presentation.

Edit the recording tutorial with interactive objects for explicit illustration
There is a library of objects to decorate the recording, such as Flash animation, highlight boxes, and clickable buttons for directing users to another slide or a URL page. Users can enhance the presentation by adding the objects to make the illustration explicit. And it allows users to rerecord the narration or import the audio for the training content. Furthermore, multiple tutorial projects can be integrated as one.

Publish the presentation for online training
To make interactive training presentations, the predominately used publishing output media type in DemoCreator is Flash movie and Html. Trainers can provide the video tutorials compliant with SCORM or AICC. The screencasts are available through both commercial and open source learning management systems for school education and enterprise training.

The screencast training is clearer and more engaging than traditional teaching; the training tutorials can be played as many times as needed; the tutorial videos are for "anytime/anywhere" learning… These advantages make screencast an outstanding training method, especially in this tough economic time. For enterprise, the training content can be put on the Knowledge Management System like SharePoint or Learning Management System like Moodle for knowledge sharing and technology training. Then the trainees and employees can learn the technology on Internet freely.

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