Camtasia | Elearning Authoring

In our previous article series, we explored different LMSs in today’s market and took a closer look at the role they play in helping businesses design and conduct corporate training and education initiatives.

Companies are filling LMSs with online, self-paced curricula in the form of elearning, which is quickly becoming a popular and effective way for training departments to educate employees. These articles examine some of the instructional design elearning tools available today and explore how organizational leaders can use these programs to customize online training for internal and external audiences.

Overview

Screen video capturing software is a growing asset to large companies, small businesses, and corporate trainers. One of the most popular products is Camtasia, a product of TechSmith. This program is used to create instructional videos, software documentation, presentations, demos and more.  With newer capabilities and user-friendly tutorials, Camtasia is becoming more widely used.

What It Does

Camtasia makes a recording of your computer screen. It captures everything from cursor movement to pop-ups. The videomaking process is broken down into three major elements: recording, editing, and sharing.

Businesses invest in Camtasia to support their marketing and sales initiatives. It is also used by instructional designers to create innovative training material.

Teachers and others in the education field find it beneficial to create lessons. Many, of its tools make it easy for students to follow along with course material even when they, or the teacher, are absent.

Features and Benefits

Camtasia has a variety of creative features. The recording process has a lot of options that make it flexible and adaptable to certain projects or specifications. As you record your screen, you can:

• Add music tracks, computer audio, and voice-over. These features make your presentation more dynamic and professional.
• Integrate a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation into your video. The PowerPoint toolbar includes a record button directly on the menu. The title slides from the presentation are generated by the program and inserted as the table of contents. Having a table of contents in your video lets viewers jump to a specific section.
• The SmartFocus feature allows you to produce your video at smaller dimensions if your source clip or recording dimensions are large. It also predicts and adds zoom-in effects to certain parts of your video so you don’t have to do it manually. It shows more detail and draws the viewers’ attention to specific points.

There are a number of editing options that can make your video innovative and personalized:

• Graphics that direct attention.
• Links to web pages or other sections of the video.
• Customized cursor effects that help to keep your viewers focused.
• Transitions to break up content and divide it into topics.

Camtasia’s latest version also has speech-to-text capabilities. In addition to manually entering text as captions, you can narrate your video verbally, and the program will automatically turn it into written captions. This lets the developer conveniently choose a preferred method. It is also 508 compliant, making it accessible to people with disabilities.

Videos created in Camtasia can be shared and viewed in a variety of formats:

• M4V: Used with Apple products
• MP4/FLV/SWF: Compatible with Adobe Flash Player
• AVI: Used for CD/DVD
• Silverlight: Compatible with WMV
• MOV: Used by QuickTime
• RM: RealMedia
• GIF: (animated)
• MP3: Contains audio only

Being able to save, share, and view videos in multiple formats gives more options to both the video maker and the viewer.

Camtasia is a widely used video capturing program that offers a variety of basic and advanced options for recording, editing, and sharing your video.

Source: techsmith.com, macworld.com, employee.heartland.edu, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov