Quality audio is important to achieving the best educational results.
In most situations, we learn through both our audio channel and our video channel. But most of the learning comes through the audio channel. So it is particularly important for the audio to be of high quality:
- Understandable
- No distracting background noises
- Consistent in pitch, pacing and volume
- Practiced
Most Recorded Lectures are not very Good
Most educational institutions have mountains of recorded lectures, and almost never will anyone listen to them, because they are not very good.
There are two ways to record lectures, and both have some problems.
- Recorded live, during a real lecture
- Recorded in a studio.
Live Lecture Recordings
During a live lecture, the speaker will be relatively distant from the microphone, making it hard to get the best quality sound. As the speaker turns their head, the volume will decrease. With P’s and T’s, there is an explosive burst of air (and sometimes spit) that makes a popping sound and can be difficult to fully suppress later from the recording.
Microphone type and quality is determined by the live setting. Large, bulky microphones aren’t usually used, even though they can provide the truest, richest, warmest sound reproduction.
Unless the speaker has given this lecture many times before, there will be hesitations, stops, pauses, misstatements and other human errors that are awkward live, and tedious when played back.
Some speakers are practiced, enthusiastic, energetic, and inspirational. Their recordings are reflective of this skill. But most medical education speakers are something less than energetic and inspirational, at least at the interface between student and professor. These lecturers produce a product that is not that terrific, and the recording of that not-terrific-product results in a not-terrific-product that is embedded on a hard drive.
Most speakers try to strike a balance between education and entertainment in their lectures, and this is usually a mistake. Unless the topic lends itself to this blend, the quality of the lecture rapidly deteriorates and is neither very educational, nor frankly very entertaining.
Because it is time-consuming (expensive) to edit the audio after the lecture is over, most resource-restricted departments will simply record the lecture and make it available to students and housestaff for later listening.
They almost never listen later.
Studio Lecture Recordings
In a studio, it is easy to suppress background noise, use high-quality microphones positioned very close to the narrator’s mouth, and an inexpensive “spit shield” eliminates the pops from P’s and T’s.
But there are some problems that can arise in the studio.
Studios are unnatural places that take some adjustment. A good public speaker won’t necessarily be a good studio narrator, and a mediocre lecture won’t necessarily improve that much if the same material is given in a studio. It may be worse.
When giving a lecture in front of a live audience, I pace my speaking to accommodate audience reaction. In a studio, without the audience, it’s hard to do that pacing well, and even then, it ends up not sounding right.
Some narrators (myself included), prefer to work off a script in the studio. The script tightens up the lecture to the most essential elements, and allows me to focus on content delivery, rather than thinking ahead about what I’m going to say.
But reading the script works best when the script is well-written and designed for an audience or individual to listen to. Some of the worst scripts come from textbooks or articles the lecturer has previously written. The way you write for an article is not the same way you will speak conversationally to someone, and this difference becomes painfully evident as soon as someone starts reading their article to the audience.
I recently listened to half of a commercially-prepared postgraduate lecture on a pregnancy complication. I know the narrator, and have listened to him give lectures on several occasions. He’s a good lecturer.
The recorded lecture was terrible, and I couldn’t finish it.
Instead of giving his usual well-informed lecture, he basically read an article he had written on the topic, presumably because the commercial education company told him he had to use a script while recording the lecture in a studio.
In this case, insisting on a script was a mistake. The pacing was wrong, his voice was flat while reading, and it was way too long a lecture for a not very complicated topic. The commercial company would have done better sitting him in front of a microphone and sing him to give his usual good lecture on the topic.
So the point is…
If you just record a live lecture of a medical educator, you’ll usually end up with a product that is not very good and no one will want to listen to it.
Moving into the recording studio will solve some of the problems with a live recording, but not all of them.
Working off a script is generally a good idea, unless the script is poorly written, designed for printed copy, too long, or your narrator loses his enthusiasm. In these cases, a scripted lecture will be tedious and few people will get through the whole thing.