Tuesday, 1 December 2009, Tom Kuhlmann of Articulate (VP of Community) published a blog post on effective uses of audio in e-learning courses. His post is about using background audio, or ambient sounds, and he included this great example from the New York Times:

Click here to view the New York Times demo.

But, his post made me think of something beyond background audio, and I remembered a March 2009 client course where the client and I created a “scene” to model effective posture, words/phrases, and tone of voice. Take a look:

The setup is somewhat similar to the NYT demo, but we didn’t use background audio. Honestly, that never occurred to me, and after reading Tom’s post and seeing the NYT demo, I’d like to add targeted, effective background audio (ambient sounds) to scenes in e-learning courses.

One example I can think of is a course on business etiquette and customer service for back-office staff in a very busy environment.

Hmmm. I can hear the phones ringing off the hook even now!

You may also be interested in this blog post:

Voice-Over Audio Narration for e-Learning

Please share your thoughts in the Comments section of this post. If you’re not a spammer, I’ll approve you!